Funded by the Bibliothèque publique d’information (€ 5,000) and the Procirep (€ 3,000).
Direct Action by Guillaume Cailleau et Ben Russell
Jury statement: We wish to give the 2024 Cinéma du Réel Grand Prix to a film whose rigour and cinematic breadth are commensurate with its length. This film dodges activist conventions to plunge us into its own temporality, where each detail, each gesture, helps to create a whole universe, another possible world. We were moved by the myriad resonances woven into its monumental structure, where form and content blend harmoniously, where what’s personal turns out to be eminently political.
Funded by the association Les Amis du Cinéma du réel (5,000€).
Award: Silence of Reason by Kumjana Novakova
Jury statement: Jaques Rivette said that the role of a work of art is to plunge people into horror and this film does precisely that, by organising – in a sometimes imperfect dispositif – the testimonies of Bosnian women raped by Serbian soldiers during the Yugoslav war. At a time when Serbian nationalism is growing (as in other parts of Eastern Europe and the world), at a time when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is resulting in an increasing number of victims (fuck Putin and all his supporters), this film is more important than ever.
Special mention: you burn me by Matías Piñeiro
Funded by the Centre national des arts plastiques (5,000€).
Award: The Words Women Spoke One Day by Raphaël Pillosio
Jury statement: The film we want to honour is a film that transforms the impossible reconstitution of silent film footage into an opportunity to examine divisions and fraternity within the activism for Algerian independence in the early 1960s. The women in this group of activists and bombers are forever marked by their contradictions, their commitments. While these images seem limited outside the historical context, they become eloquent and powerful on screen. A delicate inquiry begins to find the lost sound, to restore to all these women combatants their voice. And even with their moments of latency and silence, they nonetheless remain strong enough for their destinies and voices to traverse the screen and reach those who have survived and resonate with the audience 60 years later. The Cnap Award for French films goes to The Words Women Spoke One Day by Raphaël Pillosio.
Special mention: Journey into Gaza by Piero Usberti
Funded by La Sacem (1 000 €) and awarded to the composer of the original music of a feature film from the Competition.
The Soldier’s Lagoon by Pablo Álvarez-Mesa, original soundtrack by Stefan Schneider and Alex Lane
Jury statement: The film’s original music and, more broadly, its soundtrack can be heard as an overall approach to the landscape. Breaking from it with the percussion parts or, on the contrary, in symbiosis with the mineral, animal or liquid matter, it invites us to try to see with our ears. In broad daylight, immersed in the mists or night, the audience contemplates. Like the bats in the film, we try to map the environment through musical signals, like a radar. We are submerged in the musical structures that rub against each other, collide or espouse the film to create an indivisible whole.
Funded by Capi Films (€ 3,500).
The Roller, the Life, the Fight by Elettra Bisogno, Hazem Alqaddi
Jury statement: A film with an extremely current and urgent socio-political theme, but which avoids the miserabilistic stereotype, full of emotions that include struggle, despair, frustration, but also courage, hope, desire and love. All of this filmed in an intimate, genuine and also very inventive way, with an extremely tender ending. In this moment of utmost gravity in Palestine we were also touched by a film that begins with the forced departure of a young Palestinian man on a rough journey to Europe.
Funded by the Bibliothèque publique d’information (€ 2,500).
Award: The Periphery Of The Base by Zhou Tao
Jury statement: For a film which moved us by its use of distance and alienation to portray a provisional community of laborers existing in the dystopic fringe-lands of an always just off-screen infrastructural project. The unmoored camera slowly tracks and skids through space, alighting on human figures dwarfed by a rocky dust-scape whose value has been rescripted by big industry, militarism and removal. This deftly wandering choreography reveals a profound investment in site, one charged by the collision of “progress” and the culture it displaces and erases.
Special mention: Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke by Tomonari Nishikawa
Funded by Tënk (500 € and acquisition of SVOD broadcasting rights on the platform Tënk).
Award: And Always, That Look… by Pierre Tonachella
Jury statement: For the way it presents an underappreciated rural and peripheral France in which youth lives and flourishes; for its relentless editing, sense of framing, and duration of shots, as well as its structure intertwining readings of theoretical texts and scenes of daily life; for its ability to keenly film the sometimes mysterious relationships and interactions of this group of boys who embody a performative and constructed social masculinity, while simultaneously bringing forth singularities and strong characters.
Funded by Ciné+. It guarantees that the film is bought by the channel for €15,000 and broadcast.
Award: Who Cares? by Alexe Poukine
Jury statement: For its attentive, meticulous and caring gaze; for its representation of reality through a game, the game of reality; for its choice of a subject that draws on the profound interest of staging bodies and dialogue, a staging that reveals and untangles difficult situations; for this poignant portrait of learning about roles and care-giving; for its powerful images of what becoming a carer and a cared-for involves.
Special mention: The Words Women Spoke One Day by Raphaël Pillosio
Jury statement: [Whether you like them or have reservations, whether you are thrilled, confused, moved or irritated, the films we have seen this week impressed us on account of the force with which they manage to raise questions, fire up debates and passions around the representation of reality, realities, in images. Yesterday evening, after discussing for several hours, we tried to take into account the jury’s diverse emotions and reactions and reach a shared choice, which was no easy matter.]
For the disconcerting faithfulness with which it manages to weave together the fragile threads of a lost history, to restore voices and substance to stories and struggles that are still burning yet hardly visible; for the honesty, humility with which the film lets the silences, the lapses of memory, the refusals tell their own story.
Funded by the Direction générale des médias et des industries culturelles of the Ministry of Culture (€ 2,500) and awarded to a film of more than 50 minutes from the International Competition.
Award: Resonance Spiral by Filipa César & Marinho De Pina
Jury statement: For its poetry, its sensitivity, its humility. For the magic of this place where struggles and transmissions converge, for its resonance with our profession and our ideals, for its positive vibration that transforms and upraises us, both here and over there.
Special mention : Sauve qui peut by Alexe Poukine
Awarded and funded by the Direction générale des patrimoines et de l’architecture of the Ministry of Culture (€ 2,500) to a film from the Competition.
Sous les feuilles by Florence Lazar
Jury statement: This could be a tale where the past is revealed in the eye of a cyclone. A cyclops of wind whose swell recalls our ancestors. But it’s real.
It seems that it was time, in 2007, when Cyclone Dean brought to light in Anse Bellay (Martinique) people buried in the 18th century after a life of slavery. Archaeological digs also made it possible to identify Native American graves from the 12th and 5th centuries.
“Archaeological materials belonging to the French State?”
Or rather ancestors?
2019: following the mobilisation of the Kollektif Anse Bellay, these human remains, which had been transferred to Mainland France for analysis, returned to Martinique. A derogation that will soon no longer be necessary given ongoing legislative changes.
2023: the bodies are buried a second time, 300 years later, in a woch lista, a rock of history. Dinité, Lonnè, Respé pou yo.
Florence Lazar’s attentive and positive camera shows the living of today who remember, ask themselves questions, gather in silence, and draw strength from their dead. Recover a living heritage, with their knowledge of healing plants. The manchineel, logwood, almond trees… Nou pran tan kouté pié bwa, “Let us take the time to listen to the trees”. We stay under the leaves.
Endowed by the Fondation Monique Desfosse (1,000 €).
Camarades by Ulysse Sorabella
Jury statement: We have decided to award a film that seems home-made.
With its sincerity and sensitivity, it cuts through the chaos of daily life, expresses life’s ups and downs. The material mess is a reflection of the characters’ inner life.
We liked the contrast between a sometimes rough camerawork and the more stable shots, akin to windows of lucidity that open out of the confusion of everyday life. The music and sound design enrich this scansion between tension and its release.
We also felt the tremendous sensitivity of this film, which perhaps speaks modestly, and above all, about the relationship between two friends.
For us, this film has a personal resonance – we found a parallel with our own situation as inmates. Of course, comparison is always imperfect, but everything felt like an echo: the gated entrance, the presence of the police, the courtyard and its body-building bench, the small university room reminiscent of a cell, Hadrian’s oral exam in front of a jury, recalling a prisoner before a judge, and even the C building!
Endowed by the Clarens Foundation for Humanism (€5,000) and awarded to a feature film from any of the festival’s categories.
he Roller, the Life, the Fight d’Elettra Bisogno, Hazem Alqaddi
Jury statement: For the reserve and appropriateness of its cinematic gesture, for a camera that becomes a support strengthening the bond between two human beings to help them to surmount life’s hardships, for the richness of this dual view of a refugee’s story.
This award is funded by the CNC (€2,000), who buys the rights from the author.
Fatmé by Diala Al Hindaoui
In the context of ParisDOC Works-in-Progress
Green line – L’enfant-chat by Sylvie Ballyot
Jury statement: Today, the Festival resonates to an even greater extent with current events. It questions us on our relationship to reality, to memory, to the darkness of our civilisation. Screens are the mirrors of our society, and through its selection and the filmmakers’ gaze, the Festival affords the glimpse of a ray of light. I would like to have a special thought for Laurent Achard, a unique and outstanding filmmaker, who passed away this week, and some of whose films were screened here.
This year again, the selection of films was of high quality. I would like to thank Catherine, her team and each of the filmmakers. Being allowed to see films in progress is a token of great confidence.
This year, Studio Orlando’s “coup de cœur” goes to a film that questions memory, traces, their interpretations and the resonances that the past leaves on our present lives. It gives voice to different protagonists and explores their viewpoints and their visions of events.
To achieve its ends, the film takes several paths, mingling a formally classical approach with a more dreamlike one. This produces a true power and a great desire for cinema…
Funded by the CNC (€2,000), which signs a contract with the project’s author to buy the rights for its catalogue. As the CNC has agreed to double its endowment, the Route One/DOC Award is given to two film projects.
Fantômes de Rita Renoir by Paul Bacharach
Rêvations numéricales by Sylvain Arrivé
Jury statement: For the fabulous plethora of lives revolving around an obsession.
The portrait of a free woman in the 1970s. A solitary woman who ignited the obsession of the men and women inhabited by her.
The phantom of Rita returns to haunt the filmmaker and, in turn, us.
For the intertwining of digital technology, pataphysics and psychoanalysis. What will be left of us, what will our digital traces become tomorrow? Will dreams – and writings – buried away in a computer help the filmmaker to meet his grandfather?
An encounter beyond death in the digital world.
Site 2 by Rithy Panh
Jury statement : The jury has decided to give the restoration award to a sensitive and poetic debut film. We discerned in this first work a vision that would be prolonged in the films that followed on. A contemplative and engaged gaze on marginal peoples, in exile, determined to create an intimate relationship with them and to shed light on their combats, their visions of life and their hopes amidst the chaos.