On Screen

Panasonic will be in attendance at Camerimage 2019 in Toruń, Poland, from November 9^th to16^th.

The closing ceremony of the 40^th-annual Manaki Brothers Festival was held on Saturday, 21 September 2019 in Bitola (Republic of Northern Macedonia), in the Great Hall of the local Palace of Culture. The jury, which was presided over by Ed Lachman, ASC, presented the golden Camera 300 award to Hélène Louvart, AFC, for her work on The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, by Karim Ainouz. Due to her inability to be present in person, the award was accepted on her behalf by Eric Gautier, AFC. Yorgos Arvanitis, AFC, GSC, received the Golden Camera 300 for Life Achievement Award.

The story of fidelity between Arnaud Desplechin and Irina Lubtchansky is being written here with their fourth collaboration on Roubaix, une lumière, which is in Official Competition at Cannes this year. The cinematographer recently finished work on the image of L’Homme fidèle, by Louis Garrel, and Julie Bertuccelli’s La Dernière folie de Claire Darling. (BB)

During the 72^nd Cannes Film Festival, we have published 33 written or video interviews in French and 14 in English, in which directors of photography speak about their work on the selected movies. Here are the links allowing you to read or watch each of them.

In his latest film Bertrand Bonello juggles genres and eras between ethnological documentary, historical recreation and fiction. On the one side it depicts female teenage life at a boarding school and on the other a history of Voodoo practices and slavery in Haïti. Yves Cape, AFC, SBC, lensed this unusual film in competition at the Quinzaine des réalisateurs (Directors Fortnight). (FR)

By choosing to make a screen adaptation of Franz Jägerstätter’s letters from prison (he was a young Austrian peasant and conscientious objector against Nazism), the director of Days of Heaven has delivered another three-hour-long film about activism and loyalty in which the editing forms the work itself.

As part of the eclectic selection in the Directors’ Fortnight this year, festivalgoers were able to discover a strange American film by Babak Anvari (Américano-iranien director) in which the fantastic cyclically appears in a rather classic plot centred on a love triangle. In the end, the mix isn’t always well-proportioned between the jumpy moments and the relationship falling apart in an apartment – New Orleans style – full of alcohol and giant cockroaches. British cinematographer Kit Frasier signed off on the visuals of this film, which follows the main character’s inexorable downward spiral. This is a Netflix film, and will soon be released on their platform. (FR)

Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, AFC, worked with Léa Mysius on Ava (Critics’ Week 2017, Best Cinematography award in Stokholm, 2017) and Marie Monge on Joueurs (Directors’ Fortnight 2018). He has regularly shot for documentarist Sébastien Lifshitz (Les Vies de Thérèse, Directors’ Fortnight 2016) and also Adolescentes and Sasha (to be released). He worked with Aude Léa Rapin on Heros Don’t Die, a film which mixes the genres of fiction and documentary, and which was selected in the 58^th Critics’ Week. (BB)

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)