festivals

A graduate of the Ecole nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière with a major in Cinema, Sébastien Buchmann, AFC, has been working on both documentaries and fiction films ever since. He has worked a number of times with Dominique Marchais, who is a director of activist documentaries (La ligne de partage des eaux, Nul homme n’est une île). On the fiction side, he is the faithful associate of Valérie Donzelli, La guerre est déclarée, Mickhaël Hers, Amanda, and Nicolas Pariser, alongside whom he has just completed a new philosophic-political opus entitled Alice et le Maire (Alice and the Mayor), in selection at the Directors’ Fortnight.

Held up by the night shooting of Thom Yorke’s new music video, Darius Khondji, AFC, ASC, was only able to make a quick round-trip to Cannes this year. Too late, in any case, to be able to attend the screening at the Grand Théâtre Lumière of a part of the series "Too Old To Die Young", which he and Diego Garcia shot for Nicolas Winding Refn. He was, however, able to find some time to speak with us, by phone, about this shoot in Los Angeles… (FR)

Two films shot by Julien Poupard, AFC, have already won the Caméra d’or at Cannes: Party Girl, by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger and Samuel Theis in 2014, and Divines, by Houda Benyamina, in 2016. Last year, he was with Pierre Salvadori’s film En liberté! at the Directors’ Fortnight. This year, he’s back with a first film, Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables, in Official Competition at the 72^nd Cannes Film Festival. (BB)

Hélène Louvart, AFC, signed off on the image of La Vie invisible, a Brazilian film presented at Un Certain Regard 2019. A story of two sisters that takes place from the 1950s to the present time. She tells us about her working relationship with Karim Ainouz, the director, and about their shared ambition to dare to create striking visual universes, and about how they learned to modulate that ambition so as to avoid being above the story and the characters, visually speaking. (FR)

Cinematographer Claire Mathon, AFC, sat down for an interview with François Reumont to discuss her work on Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait d’une jeune fille en feu. Here, we offer you a transcript of her words.

Cinematographer Rémy Chevrin, AFC, sat down with François Reumont to discuss his work on Christophe Honoré’s film Room 212. Here, we offer you a transcript of their interview.

Pierre Trividic and Patrick Mario Bernard have been directing films together since the 1980s. Their filmography reveals a taste for the strange and the fantastic, such as Le Cas Lovecraft (documentary), Dancing, L’Autre. With L’Angle mort, they offer us a cinema that engages simultaneously with political and romantic issues. We met Jonathan Ricquebourg, AFC, last year, to discuss Jean-Bernard Marlin’s vigorous film Sheherezade. Since then, he has also signed off on the image of Jean-Charles Hue’s Tijuana Bible, and is currently working with the Trividic-Mario Bernard tandem on their latest film, L’Angle mort. This film is presented by the ACID at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Following Winter Brothers for which she earned the award for First feature film at Camerimage in 2017, the young Swedish cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff again joined forces with Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason on a drama that portrays a former police officer mourning the loss of his wife and who brings his young daughter along on an uncertain quest into the past. Alongside the impressive Ingvar Sigurðsson (for whom the film was written), the little girl (Hlynur Pálmason’s own daughter), and a visual landscape made up of gradients of fog and rain surrounding the coastal town of Höfn (which simply means “port” in Icelandic) in the south-western part of Iceland. (FR)

Cinematographer Claire Mathon, AFC, sat down with François Reumont to discuss her work on Mati Diop’s Atlantics. We are pleased to share with you a transcript of her words.

Reading the screenplay of Vif-argent (whose working title was La Nuit je mens), Céline Bozon remembers having particularly enjoyed the mix of genres between daily chronicle of Parisian life, romance story, and fantastic film. (FR)

Angenieux Official partner of Cannes Film Festival will pay tribute to cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel AFC ASC on Friday, May 24 during the 7^th edition of the ” Pierre Angenieux ExcelLens in Cinematography” ceremony.

The 72^nd Annual Cannes Film Festival will take place from 14-25 May, 2019. The official selection was announced on Thursday, 18 April by Pierre Lescure, President of the Festival, and Thierry Frémaux, its General Delegate, and includes nineteen feature-length films in competition, sixteen in “Un certain regard” and eleven out of competition and in the other sessions – not to mention Cannes Classics. Eight of these films were shot, and one was directed, by AFC member cinematographers.

After the announcement by the Cannes Film Festival of its official selection for 2019 comes the turn of the parallel sections – Critics’ Week, Directors’ Fortnight, and ACID – to unveil the list of films that they will screen. Four of them were shot by members of the AFC.

Philippe Rousselot, AFC, ASC, took advantage of his stay in Poland to participate in a number of events and seminars concerning cinematography. The former assistant to Nestor Almendros has become one of the legends of cinematography in France and abroad (John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest, Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons, and Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot). The most relaxed and informal of these events was definitely the free-flowing discussion he had with the many attendees who came to listen to his vision of the profession.

During a seminar, a group of cinematographers joined together to “engage” a dialogue with managers of the American content distribution platform.

As every year for four years, the AFC gave, this Wednesday, November 14, a Master Class as part of the Festival Camerimage. As in previous years, the format of three cinematographers / speakers was preserved (each ½ hour) and in this year 2018, Céline Bozon, Gilles Porte and David Ungaro defended the colors of the AFC in front of a a large audience of young people, and under the leadership of Maestro Benjamin Bergery, Benjamin B, who, as usual, had studied and prepared his score well.

In the middle of Camerimage’s closing ceremony, Marek Zydowicz, the director of the festival, suddenly announced that Camerimage 2018 would be the last Camerimage festival to be held in the Bydgoszcz. As a result of the mayor’s decision to cut the city’s funding of the festival from 2.5 million zlotys to 500,000 zlotys, Mr. Zydowicz has launched an international appeal to other cities that would welcome Camerimage 2019.

In a deluge of wide-angle shots, Greek director Yórgos Lánthimos features a lesbian and Rock ‘n’ Roll version of Dangerous Liaisons at this year’s Camerimage Festival. A game of chess, of seduction, and of power between three women at the uppermost echelons of 1710 England. Natural lighting, fish-eye, and panoramic panning shots are on offer in this unusual historical picture, which is evocative of Barry Lindon for its use of natural lighting, the world of the theatre for its behind-closed-doors setting in a palace, and the world of music videos for its choice of lenses. The very Rock ‘n’ Roll cinematographer Robbie Ryan (a Rolling Stones pin affixed to his distressed blue jumper) participated in the traditional question-and-answer session following the end of the screening, just before midnight.