Winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival in 2006, Soap has been touring prestigious festivals ever since and experienced several theatrical releases. Why those theatrical releases have been mostly limited or so belated -in France for instance the film has just been released- is probably due to the very Scandinavian side of the film.

What is that ‘Scandinavian’ side? Is it that very same thing that actually played down as outstanding as award-winning features such as Elling by Petter Naess, Songs from the second floor by Roy Andersson, Insomnia by Erik Skjoldbjaerg (for which there even was an American remake!), Lilya 4-Ever by Lukas Moodysson or more recently The Bothersome Man by Jens Lien and even The Direktor by Danish director Lars Von Trier?

Why don’t those films yield as good results as in their home countries? Is it a question of language? (Those films are hardly dubbed and the international audience seems to find it hard to listen to Scandinavian sounds…) A question of climate? (Maybe it’s hard too for the general audience to handle the environment and the light from those Northern regions…) What else? Scandinavian style and culture? (A sick humor, a disconcerting self-deriding tone, as radical as unpredictable formal biases, no clear frontier between good and evil –unlike the US pattern-, which may be disturbing for the audience since there is no possibility to identify to a specific hero). Or simply precisely biases and shortcuts? (Scandinavian cinema = Bergman = Way too intellectual…).

And yet, Scandinavian cinema has never been so dynamic and innovative with emerging promising or established filmmakers such as Bent Hamer, Lukas Moodysson, Dagur Kari or Susanne Bier, and not the only Kaurismaki, Bergman and Von Trier –though the latter keeps renewing his work and stand out to that effect as one of the rare established directors to question and play with cinema as cinema maybe plays with its audience! In THE DIREKTOR for instance, Von Trier emphasizes the radicalism of his intention by producing DVD extras that preserve the derision of the film and by breaking his own status as a filmmaker and the actors’ images –turning his cast into mere victims of cinema machinery embodied in the film by the Automavision process, which frames in an uncertain way the characters (excluding them on and off from the field and deliberately escaping thus from the director’s control !).

Back to Pernille Fischer Christensen’s Soap, the film handles in an original and bold way the topic of transsexuality through the story of Veronica, a woman since always yet waiting for the ultimate surgery that will definitely and definitively remove all doubts to that effect. An introvert and romantic woman, Veronica watches day after day her favourite TV show, a soap opera. Until the day she meets by chance with her new neighbour, Charlotte, who’s just broken up with her boyfriend and moved into the building. Charlotte is a gorgeous extravert and strong-headed woman. And yet she’s far from being satisfied with her life. Something she can not identify is missing… Spiciness? Creativity? Love? All of them? In any case, she is fascinated by Veronica…

More demanding than Transamerica, Soap ventures into both sophisticated and bold formal paths –in the way of a soap opera- and follows realistic, complex and attaching characters, with an unusual, crude, humoristic, cruel, well ‘Scandinavian’ tone! An iced tragedy-comedy to be discovered absolutely !

Françoise Duru

Good Girl (2005) by Sophie Fillières.
“This is a movie in which the directing work is amazing. The actors have many things to say, to act too, and the director manages to get all the accurate lines. It is very difficult because it is very written, kind of litterary, but the directing work makes it become magic, easy, pleasant to ear, and we are carried away by this work she managed to do with the actors about the text and the acting. At a point it all gets together to serve a very funny and inventive film.”

More informations about Good Girl.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick, picked by Pip Chodorov
A piece of sky (2002) by Bénédicte Liénard, picked by Jacques Bidou
Apocalypto (2006) by Mel Gibson, picked by Alain Guiraudie
Chronicle of Anna-Magdalena Bach (1968) by Jean Marie Straub, picked by Bruno Dumont
City Lights (1931) by Charles Chaplin, picked by Adelaïde Leroux
Climates (2006) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, picked by Harry Gruyaert
Come and See (1985) by Elem Klimov, picked by Jean Pierre Limosin
Golden Eighties (1986) by Chantal Akerman, picked by Martine Marignac
Good Girl (2005) by Sophie Fillières, picked by Yann Coridian
Graduate First (Passe ton bac d’abord) (1979) by Maurice Pialat, picked by Jaques Maillot
Hangmen Also Die (1943) by Fritz Lang, picked by Nuno Sena
I Love You I Love You (1968) by Alain Resnais, picked by Lisa Heredia
Moi, Pierre Rivière… (1976) by René Allio, picked by Gérard Mordillat
Sunrise (1927) by F.W. Murnau, picked by Jean-Max Causse
The Birds (1963) by Alfred Hitchcock, picked by Jean-Claude Brisseau
The Invisible Man (1933) by James Whale, picked by Alain Cavalier
The Night of the hunter (1955) by Charles Laughton, picked by Joseph Morder
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) by Carl Th. Dreyer, picked by Fernando Solanas
The Pianist (2002) by Roman Polanski, picked by François Marquis
The Thin Red Line (1998) by Terrence Malick, picked by Erick Zonca
The Thing From Another World (1951) by Howard Hawks, picked by Luc Moullet
There Was a Father (1942) by Yasujiro Ozu, picked by Kiju Yoshida
Tropical Malady (2004) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, picked by Garin Nugroho
Viridiana (1961) by Luis Buñuel, picked by Andre S.Labarthe
Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) by François Ozon, picked by Juliane Lorenz

In Cambodia, on March 18, 1970, Lon Nol, King Sihanouk’s prime minister, came to power in a coup d’état backed by the United States, whose goal was to reach North Vietnamese troops in the northern region of the country. With the support of China, the Khmer Rouge began a struggle to overthrow the government. Asked by the former king to fight against American imperialism, farmers and laborers joined the Khmer in massive numbers. On April 17, 1975, Phnom Penh fell into the hands of communist rebels. The following night, cities were emptied of their inhabitants, taken to the countryside for political indoctrination. Hence began one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, a genocide that would result in nearly two million deaths out of a total population of seven million.

Rithy Panh, eleven years old at the time, was among the stream of deportees forced to leave the cities for indoctrination by the Angkar (“The Organization”, the ruling body of the Khmer Rouge). On January 2, 1979, the Vietnamese, former allies in the struggle against the United States, overthrew the Pol Pot regime, and fear, hunger, forced labor and propaganda destroyed the memories and the identity of the Cambodian people. Like many of his fellow countrymen, Rithy Panh fled to Thailand, where he was miraculously reunited with his sister. After moving from camp to camp, he eventually made it to France with the help of the Red Cross, joining up with his brothers who had left the country before the tragedy.

Ten years later, in 1989, after earning a degree from the IDHEC French film school, Rithy Panh returned to the Cambodia-Thailand border to direct his first documentary feature, Site 2. Within a 4.5 km² (1.7 mi²) space were confined 180,000 Cambodians entirely dependent on aid that was distributed sparingly. Armed with a permit to film in the camp, Rithy Panh met Yim Om, whose testimonial served as the framework for the film. The director showed the daily lives of the displaced persons and their struggle to survive and maintain dignity in this environment. They were struggling as well to retain their memories of what had happened during, and before, the insane experience under the Khmer Rouge, in an attempt to reconstruct the identity of an effaced and annihilated people. With no voiceover or commentary, Yim Om’s words fill the space and through her, the negated memory of years of repression is finally expressed. Rithy Panh remembered Yim Om’s accounts when he directed the fictional feature Rice People four years later, constructed around rice farming, an ancestral activity that helped found Cambodian culture, had also been shattered by the Khmer Rouge and forgotten by children in interment, for whom rice “came from the U.N.” The director tackled the recent history of his country head-on two years later, in 1996, with Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy. The Khmer Rouge had worked to destroy individuals; Rithy Panh was struggling to keep the victims from being anonymous. With an “intellectual” couple that had been imprisoned and oppressed by the Angkar, Rithy Panh drew the picture of his country’s history during those dark times and attempted to give a face and a name to people who were designated as “enemies” to be “destroyed.” In a random incident the director would never have provoked, the film also shows the encounter in S21, the main prison and torture camp of the Angkar now converted into a museum, between Vann Nath, one of the seven survivors of the camp, and Houy, deputy head of security, who is confronted with paintings representing the horrors perpetrated on the prisoners. Forcing him to look at canvas after canvas, Nath asked the former torturer to confirm that the abuse depicted had actually occurred. The words validate the memories and confirm that this all had really happened.
In 1999, the director decided to follow Alcatel’s installation of a fiber optic cable along the former Silk Road in The Land of the Wandering Souls. Among those digging the trench intended for “magic eyes and ears,” he discovered former refugees of Site 2 who displaced persons, renting out their labor for mere crumbs. Accompanied for the first time by an entirely Cambodian crew, Rithy Panh once again gave a voice to those who no longer have a past nor a future, who are separated from their roots. Again focusing on the individual destinies of a man and a woman, the director gives expression to the ineffable suffering of a people whose universe had been destroyed and who now had to face themselves in order to become whole again. This approach was similar to that of Bophana and led to S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine in 2003. The extension of work he had begun in his previous two films, S21 focused on describing how the political core of the Angkar functioned. With the help of Nath, whom he had met while shooting Bophana, he searched for memories of the place. After finding former torturers who had worked at the camp, he gave them a voice as well, allowing them to face up to their part in the country’s collective history. One particularly forceful sequence shows a former guard, who has come back to the site, literally relive his previous daily routines, going back over movements and re-saying words, in an incredible exercise akin to a near-trance.

“What is especially at stake is to protect generations to come. In order to move forward, questions must be answered. We cannot leave our children with a gaping whole in our collective memories,” Rithy Panh writes. The same stakes hold true for his films: giving back to a country the memories of which it has been deprived, giving back a voice to those who are not heard, giving back a name to anonymous victims and confronting history in order to prepare for the future.

The four films box set which has just been released in France contains Site 2, Bophana, The Land of the Wandering Souls and S21. It’s a powerful testimony about one of the darkest hours in contemporary history and constitues a great opportunity to discover the work of a major author in documentary films.

Olivier Gonord

More informations about the DVD box set
More informations about Rice people

City Lights (1931) by Charles Chaplin.

“It comes from my childhood, my parents liked very much Charlie Chaplin’s films. His films came along with me and they still do. It’s extraordinary. This little man was a great man. The story of City Lights moves me, particularly the end of the film. She sees him and it is the first time she sees him in all his sincerity -there is something very moving here, very strong. I think that Chaplin’s films still resonate nowadays, they travel perfectly through time.”

Adelaide Leroux was seen for the time in the film Flanders by Bruno Dumont, which received the Grand Prize of the Jury in the 59th Cannes Film Festival in 2006. She is back on the “croisette” this year for Home by Ursula Meier, in which she co-stars with Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet. The film was presented in an exceptional screening at the International Critics’ Week.

More information about City Lights.

Joseph Morder has been maintaining an autobiographical diary for nearly forty years, utilizing various video formats. When contacted by Benoît Labourdette, who is in charge of the Pocket Film Festival, to direct a feature-length film with a cell-phone camera as his only window on the world, Morder entered movie history with J’Aimerais partager le printemps avec quelqu’un (literally, “I’d like to share Spring with someone”), the first feature-length movie with a theatrical release shot in this format.

The film would be a mere gimmick were it not for Morder’s talent for capturing unusually poetic and real moments thanks to the small lens: a cat at play, a romantic encounter, a trip to the country… The director also plays (unintentionally, if we are to take him at his word) with the election of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to create a character that is more fantasy than fact, a sort of media and visual monster. With the pocket camera, Morder adds a new chapter to his long diary, which draws on different cinematic formats, from Super8 to digital. Admired by Alain Cavalier, this “filmer” offers us a body of work that is not only a technical success, but also, and above all, a filmic success.

Before you started making a feature-length film on a cell phone, had you seen any other movies shot in this format? Did any of them inspire you?
I knew a certain number of films had already been shot on cell phones, and I asked to see the first one, by Jean-Charles Fitoussi: Nocturnes pour le roi de Rome [Nocturnes for the King of Rome].

Had you already considered making a film in this format?
Benoît Labourdette, who is in charge of the festival, proposed that I make a film for the Pocket Film Festival [festival of short films shot on cell phones]. He also made the same offer to other professionals. I’d already directed a short film called L’Insupportable for the festival, since I didn’t have a cell phone. I wanted to take a stab at making a feature with my filmed diary, a genre I’ve been making for 40 years. That’s how the film came about.

Do you think the cell phone was a determining factor in the way the film was directed?
Yes, I do. A standard camera wouldn’t have given the same results. When I shoot in a certain format, I try to think about how it’s specifically distinct, whether it be Super8 or digital. What the cell phone could produce in terms of image and sound is not at all the same thing as another format. That’s what interested me in the adventure: it was like plunging into totally uncharted waters. I mastered it little by little, and at the same time, that bothered me and I tried not to get to know it too well in order to maintain a state of surprise.

As you were exploring use of the cell phone, did you make a lot of rushes?
There were rushes, about ten hours, which isn’t enormous for something akin to a documentary. But the film was edited as a normal production, with a professional editor: Isabelle Rathery.

Are the events displayed fact or fiction?
They’re a mix. Fiction is a part of the film. For example, the scene where I lose my datebook is based on a real event that was transposed.

One senses that you like to tease reality. In Alain Cavalier’s films, his choice is what’s extraordinary within the ordinary. Your approach is more spontaneous, almost improvisational, in that you infuse fiction and something extraordinary into the ordinary.
Although there’s improvisation, there’s also work – especially with the actors – and certain situations are thought up beforehand. Within this framework, I let myself go along with whatever happens. That’s what interests me. In the scene with Sacha at the café, I didn’t know what I was filming until that shot where he’s smoking a cigarette. That’s how I work with a purely fictional screenplay: I try to extract what seems essential to me in any one scene. At the beginning, I don’t know what I’ll end up with. I improvise within defined territory. I direct the scene.

You direct it without a set.
Yes, and I’m open to the unexpected. With my previous film, El Cantor, which was written, had a storyboard and where everything prepared and rehearsed, I was still open to surprises when we were shooting. When I saw a bird on a lamppost, I’d ask my director of photography to focus the camera on it. It was all prepared well enough so that we were open to surprises. Even with 35mm films, you can get the same light feeling as with a cell-phone camera. Improvisation is something that truly needs preparation; you have to prepare tremendously in order to be amenable and open.

You try not to master the format you use. Is originality crucial for you?
For me, being original means, above all, being yourself. If that’s not what it means, I don’t know what is. But I also strive for a certain traditionalism, by incorporating the idea of avant-garde into this definition. I strive for something that can become traditional.

Twice at the beginning of the film, you point to the same street and say “Sasha.” Was that spontaneous, or was it part of the fictional storyline? That section reminds me of André Breton’s Nadja, where he shows Paris by introducing the streets, then ends up showing Paris by introducing Nadja.
This change emerged from the length of the shoot. Three months had gone by and I wasn’t thinking about Paris anymore, but about Sacha. At that moment, I was no longer trying to say “Paris”; Sasha was at the center of my thoughts. It was my own evolution and that of my character.

The cell phone, with the surprising way it handles contrast, truly “enchants” the world. When you film a camera, you say, “There’s your big sister.” You turn objects and animals…
… into characters. I have twenty-five plants at home and I say good morning to them every day. I think I have a deep sense of reality, but I like to interject a bit of fantasy or little amusing things into life.

The peculiar, “aquatic” image from the cell phone creates a sort of barrier between you and the world. When you film the elections, you have a specific relationship with your camera, but not with the politicians, who are filmed by a hundred anonymous cameras. You film the people who elected Sarkozy and say “madness” in Yiddish. Do you have a pessimistic vision of the world?
No, I don’t think so. I thought the Left would win up to the very end. I think I have an optimistic nature. I’m actually glad to see people laugh at the beginning of the film.

When you tackle different types of formats and images, are you trying to see the world in a new way?
I do it because I enjoy it. And I’m especially trying not to master the format I use. As soon as I become familiar with a format, I like to call it into question by moving on to something else, so as not to treat the image in the same way. I try to avoid any complacency. I don’t try to explain the world. Cinema is just a show. My only goal is to entertain the audience for an hour and a half, but still leave them with an “aftertaste,” with something that lingers. If I wanted to change the world, I’d go into politics, and even then…

Are you a compulsive filmmaker?
In part, but my background’s in narration. Into the storyline, I introduce sections that I wanted to film at a particular moment.

By Alexandre Péron, in Paris, France

The Night of the hunter (1955) by Charles Laughton.

“This film is unique. First because it’s the only one made by Charles Laughton, and secondly it’s an astonishing masterpiece that can’t be categorised in any genre. It stands somewhere between pure cinema and archaism and its story is related to the roots of filmmaking. Every time I watch it, I’m moved like if it was the first time. This movie, among others, remains close to me through my journey into life. I happen to have my own ritual about this film : I have a rag doll at home which carries an odd resemblance with the one the little girl has in the movie ; every time I watch it I must hold this doll tight against me.”

Joseph Morder directed El Cantor (2005), Carlota (1992) and Mémoires d’un Juif tropical (1988). His films question, among other thigs, identity and exile related to Jewish condition.

Read more about The Night of the Hunter

Read the interview with Joseph Morder

Opening a new chapter of his “true-false” autobiography (it is in fact fiction based on reality and riddled with excerpts from vignettes of his real life), Joseph Morder recounts the story of one Spring he shared with his plants, his cats and his friend Sacha, but also with Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, and of course with us, the audience, complicit readers of his diary.

Clearly privileging innocence and fun, Morder offers a variety of short poetic moments as sketches, where objects and pets are graced with beauty and humanized in a mere instant: a conversation with a kitten, the intimate “rise and shine” of flowers on his terrace, shots of Paris streets, … Everyday elements are transformed and magnified with a skillful, focused approach, despite the unusual format of this odd camera.
This peculiar approach to the visual image is worth seeing, with a wavy motion across the screen and the raw and unstable contrast in the lighting, more white than it is luminous. Morder’s cell-phone camera creates a barrier between the eye and the world: the latter appears slightly distant, odd and sometimes incomprehensible. The filmmaker sets up this universe using a public event: the 2007 French presidential elections and the “Royal vs. Sarkozy” duel. Television becomes the arena for the fate of the People who, mesmerized by this exceptional media combat, also become a visual and media monster.
But Morder pleads innocent and highlights above all his attempt at creating a modest and amusing simplicity. As he himself claims: he is in the worst position to talk about his own work. It would thus be useless to interpret, or over-interpret, his film. Suffice it to say that Morder is a true poet who strives for image before meaning, and beauty before esthetics. His film is a rare testimony to poetic “snapshots,” is often funny, and always clever.

Alexandre Péron

Jean-Claude Brisseau was discovered by Eric Rohmer in 1975 at an amateur film festival, where his first movie, La Croisée des Chemins, shot in Super 8, was being screened. At the time, Brisseau taught French in a Paris-suburb middle school, a profession he exercised for more than twenty years. Shortly afterwards, he was hired by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, which in 1978 produced his first feature-length film, La Vie Comme Ça (Life The Way It Is), initially made for television. His next films, shot directly for theatrical release, dealt with big-city cruelty and violence, both physical and psychological; into this urban reality he incorporated spiritual and metaphysical elements, the secret to his unique approach, and combined fantasy, social commentary and romance. Mysticism and irrationality abound in the urban housing developments of De Bruit et de Fureur (Sound and Fury, 1988) – the film made a name for him at the Cannes Film Festival that same year – and seep from the walls of the provincial abode in Céline (1992). He also offered unique roles to actresses with a strong public image, going against their usual current, whether it be Vanessa Paradis in Noce Blanche (White Wedding, 1989), her first movie role, or Sylvie Vartan in L’Ange Noir (The Black Angel, 1994), which costarred Michel Piccoli and Tchéky Karyo, while the mesmerizing music was composed by Jean Musy. Six years later, Jean-Claude Brisseau shot Les Savates du Bon Dieu (Workers for the Good Lord), starring Stanislas Merhar and Raphaële Godin; director and film-critic Louis Skorecki heralded the movie as “a sublime Hollywood melodrama, a cross between Under Capricorn and The Barefoot Contessa.” With Choses Secrètes (Secret Things, 2002) and Les Anges Exterminateurs (The Exterminating Angels, 2006), which was shown in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, he turned his attention to transgression and female desire in a singularly unprecedented way.

An extraordinary cineaste, and an avid fan of Hitchcock and Buñuel, Jean-Claude Brisseau makes films that walk a cinematic tightrope and divert from the norm with utter control. His movies are both popular and marginal, traditional and experimental, uncompromising, fearless, are free of moral judgment and recognize no taboos. “Buñuel went through hell during the last thirty years of his life,” said Skorecki, “and Brisseau is courageously looking at two or three decades of being misunderstood.”

More informations about Jean-Claude Brisseau 4 films Box Set.

Merry-Go-Round (1956) by Zoltan Fabri.
“It was a time when there was a certain freedom in Hungary before the Soviet forces come to “put back things in order” and Zoltan Fabri makes here an absolutely wonderful film, close to Italian neo-realism or Jean Renoir’s A day in the country. He has a fantastic way to film the main character, who rides a merry-go-round at the beginning of the film and I think that nobody ever filmed a young and beautiful girl in love riding a merry-go-round -maybe the swing in A day in the country- in such an amazing way. We can see Fabri playing with what he is expected to do. It is the struggle between a father, his daughter and love, and it’s a wonderful film.”

More details about Merry-Go-Round.

Bernard Queysanne started as an assistant director, an assistant editor, a still photographer and a production manager in turn on many films by Georges Franju, Philippe Labro, Robert Enrico, Serge Korber among others. He co-directed The Man Who Sleeps with Georges Perec, which earned him the prestigious Jean Vigo Prize in 1974.