Cinéma du Réel - International Documentary Film Festival



source: http://www.cinereel.org/

Since it was created 30 years ago, the Cinéma du Réel has become the outstanding international documentary film festival in France. Open to a wide diversity of writing, forms, and ideas, it now gathers a faithful, curious and broad-based public.

Festival screenings 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.

The International Competition and the French Panorama
Some twenty first screenings of short and feature-length films from the four corners of the planet, encounters and discussions with the invited filmmakers.
A review of this year’s French documentary production in the authors’ presence.

Tribute to Pierre Perrault
Ten years ago one of the great Quebecois masters of documentary cinema passed away. Filmmaker, poet and writer, Pierre Perrault focused all his attention on the spoken language and man’s relationship with nature.

Exploring Documentary: technical dissent, insolent practices
A programme centred on the filmmakers, video-makers and plastic artists who refuse to subordinate their work to the material configurations imposed by the film industry. With films by Peter Hutton, Robert Fenz, James June Schneider, Xavier Christiaens, Jerome Schlomoff, Mako Idemitsu...

A Thousand Places
With the disorientation of contemporary geography, the “A Thousand Places” programme proposes a journey through some twenty films. A subjective journey that leads us to rethink how the world is written, as well as our relationship with it. Topographical films where the filmmakers stroll, cross, walk, stay a while, live, come and go. Some of them even return, fly over, stay until they have exhausted a place… Movements echoed by a question: how does one inhabit the movement of the world? With films from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Kramer, Andrei Tarkovsky…

Television in the vanguard
A small detour into public television when it stood as a real laboratory of creativity with respect to how it represented the world. Partnered by the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA).

>>> And also
A presentation of the work of Denis Gheerbrant in Marseille, news from filmmakers who remain close to the festival, a documentary tea-party for children, television recounted by Jacques Sojcher, a “Cinema for Ears” by Dominique Petitgand, a plunge into the festival’s memory, encounters between the different worlds of invited filmmakers, professional days (open-source in creation), video installations (Sophie Bruneau / Marc-Antoine Roudil) and audio installations.

Javier Packer-Comyn
Artistic Director

Among the 37 international films selected, 5 of them focuse on Chinais issues...
(see below)

10 min.

The reading of a legal statement reveals the vagaries of a young girl who was propelled, against her will, into a prostitution network.

A People in the Shadows

A voyage into the heart of Tehran, a megalopolis of 14 million people. The city is still recovering from its past, as talk of sanctions and a possible American attack resonate. The population is caught up in the paradoxes and contradictions o (...)

Alle Kinder bis auf eines (All the Children But One)

Karcsi, a young Roma-boy from a small Hungarian village died of pulmonary embolism in 2006, just before his 10th birthday. Now it’s up to Karcsis faithful friends to tell his story. Memory and imagination blend into a sensitive and colourful n (...)

Americana

An exploration of American identity at home and abroad by juxtaposing the personal stories of Americans overseas and those of two teenagers in their last three months of high school before their US army enlistment.

L’ Argent du charbon

On the coal road linking the Shanxi mines with the large port of Tianjin, in northern China, the drivers of 100-ton trucks shuttle endlessly to and fro, day and night. On the roadside: prostitutes, cops, petty racketeers, garage owners, mecha (...)

Bagatela (Bagatelle)

Selling pirated CDs, stealing a cell phone, or simply sleeping rough are most of the cases brought to court in Bogotá. Government officials systematically hand out heavy sentences for these petty crimes, even though they are largely the result (...)

Le Battement d’ailes d’un papillon (Wings of Butterfly)

Twenty-five years ago, in Kiev, the author was given a 16mm camera. He and his friends each began to shoot separate films as part of a longer project. Today the camera has disappeared, some of his friends too and so has the country in which t (...)

Below Sea Level

About 190 miles southeast of Los Angeles and 120 feet below sea level, a commune of outcasts lives in the middle of the desert. They’re not some hippie colony, just a group of people who have turned their backs on society and want to be left a (...)

Bombhaye porteghali (Orange Bombs)

War is over. The garden is full of cluster bombs. It is harvesting time. Husband and wife are defusing bombs and picking oranges.

California Company Town

A gaze at the landscape of California towns abandoned by the industries that created them - onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise.

Chaiqian (Demolition)

In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China, the workers of a demolition site have set up their barracks. Interactions between the director-"the man from Harvard" -and the workers, who invite him to lunch or explain to him wh (...)

La Chine est encore loin (China Is Still far Away)

As the seasons unfold, school life rhythms this chronicle of Ghassira, an Algerian village perched high the Aures mountains and which, fifty years ago, was the "cradle of the Algerian revolution". Rural Algeria in all its simplicity, brimming (...)

The City of Production

In 2002, Map Office began surveying a factory in the Pearl River Delta region. Under its aegis, this factory evolved into a fabulous laboratory that poses the challenge of positive capitalism through environmental engineering and social benef (...)

Creative Chaos: Round One

A Lebanese filmmaker living in France returns to his home village in south Lebanon in the aftermath of the 2006 war. He finds a population surrounded by destruction. He plunges into a traumatised, but still very alive, community - his own fam (...)

Defamation

What is anti-Semitism today, two generations after the Holocaust? Yoav Shamir travels the world in search of the most modern manifestations of the oldest hatred, and comes up with some startling answers.

Le Dictionnaire selon Marcus

Marcus helps inmates to escape from prison, hides the fugitives in his home, rents hideouts, steals cars, sets off with men on the run to help them reach the borders. It’s a vocation, a profession, which he assumes as an act of compassion, as (...)

Gyumri

About 25,000 inhabitants of the Armenian town of Gyumri perished in a powerfully destructive earthquake on December 7, 1988. More than one-third of the victims were children. For some parents, the children born post-quake have become a sort o (...)

Los Herederos (The Inheritors)

Children begin work in the Mexican countryside at an early age. These children’s realities echo those of their ancestors. One generation after another has remained trapped in a perpetual cycle of inherited poverty.

Job en de hollandse vrijstaat (Job and the Dutch Freestate)

"In 1988, I met a quietly eccentric man who lived in Condradstreet in Amsterdam. More than 100 squatters lived there, mostly artists. Job was in my eyes the most authentic of them all. After Conradstreet was cleared by the po:ice, the squatte (...)

Le Marcheur

The walker does not choose his pathways in the hope of encounters. Off the beaten track such meetings are rare. If encounters were his purpose, he would have chosen a region where pathways are still busy, as they are still useful to the job o (...)

Mei You Ni Zai...

A divorced Chinese immigrant earns her living by selling on Belleville market in Paris what she has gleaned from dustbins in the city’s wealthy districts. She had a love affair with a Chinese man that she met in Paris, but he has now gone back (...)

Nora

The dancer Nora Chipaumire, born in Zimbabwe in 1965, returns to the landscapes of her childhood and takes a journey through some vivid memories of her youth. Using performance and dance, she brings her history to life.

Over Jorden, under Himlen (Above the Ground, Beneath the Sky)

Little Mahmoud loves the circus and dreams of performing in the National Egyptian Circus as an acrobat. He practices hard several days a week with his mentor Kamal, who juggles the young boy on his feet one and a half meters above the ground, (...)

Parador retiro (Retiro Shelter)

Parador Retiro, an old warehouse with a concrete floor and tin roof, is used to give overnight shelter to some two hundred homeless people: chronic homeless, tumberos (ex-convicts), drunks, drug addicts, and psychotics.

Preparativi di fuga (Preparative to escape)

Filming the beautiful yet terribly harsh Calabrian countryside in grainy black and white, Tommaso Cotronei describes the daily lives of the inhabitants of his native region.

Rachel

The life and death of Rachel Corrie, a young American pacifist who was fatally crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in March 2003 while she was trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian house.

Redemption

Three young US deserters in Canada journey through their memories, which lead them back to their time in the war; to the uncertainty of their own existence, through the maze of truth and deception, guilt and innocence, obedience and disobedie (...)

Revolutsioon, mida polnud (The Revolution That Wasn’t)

The story of Anatoly, a Russian revolutionary memeber of the National Bolshevik Party who grabbed the party leadership and had his moment of glory. He then lost his comrades’ trust and was demoted to the rank of simple party member.

Robinsons of Mantsinsaari

Two elderly men are the last residents of a now-Russian-controlled island on Lake Ladoga. Although they are the sole inhabitants, neither speaks to the other: one is of Belarusian origin, the other Finnish.

Roz (and Joshua)

A mother’s longing for her child can create optimism even in the face of extreme destitution. That all-consuming love pushes Roz to liberate her heart and mind from the suffocating confines of her daily struggle.

Seishin (Mental)

The complex world of an outpatient mental health clinic in Japan, with its criss-crossing of patients, doctors, staff, volunteers, and home-helpers, people coping with suicidal tendencies, poverty, a sense of shame, apprehension and fear of s (...)

Thakira Mathkouba (Perforated Memory)

The story of a group of ex-guerrillas (Fedayeen) who were active members in the Palestinian Liberation Movement during the different stages of the struggle against Israel.

The Time of Their Lives

With a combined age of almost 300, Rose, Hetty and Alison are powerfully engaged in their individual brands of activism-from journalism to anti-war demonstrations-whilst quietly negotiating the final years of their lives.

Tjúba Tén (The Wet Season )

"An experimental ethnography film shot in Suriname. An examination of a rapidly changing culture in the present and an historical document for the future." (B.R.)

Trypps #6

"This single-take film offers a contemporary view of a procession in Malobi village in Suriname. It’s Halloween at the Equator..." (B.R.)

Was übrig bleibt (Left Behind)

In Waldenburg, Silesia, all the mines have closed down. Lukasz and his friend Jacek have been digging coal at their own risk for several years now in abandoned mines. Like hundreds of other former miners, they are illegally digging for the bl (...)

Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai (Disorder)

China’s cities are booming and there is only one word to describe the present social situation: disorder. This film integrates more than twenty singular urban events.

Films on China include:

Wang Bing, L'argent du charbon (The money of coal)



On the coal road linking the Shanxi mines with the large port of Tianjin, in northern China, the drivers of 100-ton trucks shuttle endlessly to and fro, day and night. On the roadside: prostitutes, cops, petty racketeers, garage owners, mechanics.

please click on this link to view the trailer: L'argent du charbon


Chaiqian (Demolition)
J.P. Sniadecki
62'- États-Unis- Prod: Harvard Film Study Center

2008 In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China, the workers of a demolition site have set up their barracks. Interactions between the director-"the man from Harvard" -and the workers, who invite him to lunch or explain to him where shooting is allowed or not.

please click on this link to view the trailer: Chaiqian



Mei You Ni Zai...
Wei Hu
23'- Chine, France- Prod: Wei Hu, La Fémis

2008 A divorced Chinese immigrant earns her living by selling on Belleville market in Paris what she has gleaned from dustbins in the city’s wealthy districts. She had a love affair with a Chinese man that she met in Paris, but he has now gone back to China.

please click on this link to view the trailer: Mei you ni zai



Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai (Disorder)
Weikai Huang
61'- Chine- Prod: Jiuchu LI

2009 China’s cities are booming and there is only one word to describe the present social situation: disorder. This film integrates more than twenty singular urban events.

please click on this link to view the trailer: Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai

The City of Production
Laurent Gutierrez, Valérie Portefaix
52'- Hong Kong- Prod: Map Office

2008 In 2002, Map Office began surveying a factory in the Pearl River Delta region. Under its aegis, this factory evolved into a fabulous laboratory that poses the challenge of positive capitalism through environmental engineering and social benefits for the 5,000 workers.

Please click on this link to view the trailer: The City of Production