Official competition first feature

13 movies in competition

Gradually, movie after movie, Cinema changes the world.

A first feature film? One can accept that all movies are "A first film", since each new film is different from previous ones and asks new questions in a new context, with different rules of the game, different partners, actors and technicians. But because Cinema is part of history with each one of its fibers, a First Feature Film, maybe more than the following ones has to go through obscurities, difficulties and misunderstandings. To produce and direct a First Feature Film is to take into the world order (as in the cinema world, geometrically similar in large parts) something new. A First Feature Film is something that was not planned, much less desired by the social body, a new object that inevitably upsets the homeostasis of economic and political forces, and somehow manages to settle down. A new player at the table changes the game for all players. There is always a first in every gesture that separates the world in, before and after. Like it or not, a first film is an analyzer of a new kind. It allows considering the social body in a new light - and the extraordinary responsibility taken by those who make this first film is a sense of a new reading of the world that will record what has changed and prepares to what is changing. With a first film comes the fear of not only "missing" but of rattling, even a little bit, the established order of things.

Movie goers are invited to undertake a new journey inside the contradictions of their society, in which they will see better and understand better all social relations - working and not working; loss of tradition; dire searching of today’s man and woman, lost in questions that seem intractable and are very often, indeed; insisting shimmering of "miraculous" solutions that are only propaganda in the service of power struggles...
A first film may well not talk directly about any of this, the fact remains that to be prepared, to happen, to be produced, it must confront such terrible questions, questions of our time. This is why luck and the light of grace are needed, with a child's innocence to dare jump into battle. Each first film is a battle against the already established world order, since it adds to this world a new way to see and think. It is an adventure from which we can only come out profoundly transformed: For we become a Man of modern times, a Man of Cinema.

Jean-Louis Comolli