Since 1978, the Cinéma du Réel international documentary film festival has been an outstanding international meeting point, where the public and professionals discover the films of experienced authors as well as new talents, the history of documentary cinema as well as contemporary works. The festival programs some hundred films for its various sections, screened at the Centre Pompidou, the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, the MK2 Beaubourg film theatre, the Paris City Hall and several other theatres in the Ile-de- France area.

International Competition
28 French and international premieres, as well as encounters and discussions with the filmmakers.
See the films in competition

French Selection
28 French and international premieres, as well as encounters and discussions with the filmmakers.
See the selection

Retrospectives and Special Programmes

Americana
A selection of films where commitment and the driving forces of socio-political movements (against the Vietnam war, for Black empowerment or… for a different way of life) are translated into cinematographic vitality, narrative inventiveness, reinventions of documentary and fiction The programme includes tributes to Shirley Clarke and Jim McBride.

In South-East Asia
From Kuala Lumpur to Manila, from Bangkok to Jakarta, documentary films lend images and sounds to long-buried stories, as witnessed by the works of filmmakers such as Garin Nugroho, Amir Muhammad, Raya Martin. The programme includes a tribute to Lav Diaz, the great Filipino poet of cinema, whose powerful films blend documentary and fiction into a lyrical experience.

Images / Prison: visions from inside
In several European countries, film—especially the documentary—has become a focus for workshops on filmmaking, projections and writing, organised within penal institutions. Here we attempt to understand what they mobilise within their makers and the spectators who watch them on the “outside”.

Figures of tourism : for a history of the “view”
It is well known that one part of the world makes a spectacle of the other part, and this does not date from the advent of digitalisation or miniaturisation of “picture-taking”. From the beginnings of cinema to the present day, what is being played out is a history of the “never seen” and the “already seen”. Modern tourism, with its desire for “authenticity” and “discovery, is the central theme of many films bearing the impossible dreams of the “first times”. Filmmakers take possession of tourist images, re-examine and re-compose them. The tourist as a character and tourist images as material for critical analysis guide a programme that mingles documentary and fiction, past and present, films and videos by plastic artists… to call into question the contemporary “view”.
In partnership with MNAM (Collections Cinéma et Nouveaux Medias), and in association with MK2 Beaubourg and ACRIF.

The Theatre of Reality
La Tentation du Paradis
by Vivianne Perelmuter and François Christophe, with Bruno Putzulu.
The staging of a semi-improvised piece of theatre; the play writes itself in the moment : a lost tourist, images of islands, the ghost of Christopher Columbus, tropical storms…

Special screenings and events Bernardo Bertolucci’s “La Via del petrolio”, Hartmut Bitomsky’s “Staub” etc

See the whole program on the Film Festival website