AFC’s Conversations

For his seventh film as director, actor and director Albert Dupontel chose a rather pessimistic dark comedy in which, as is usual in his films, contemporary social reality sometimes slips into an expressionist world that is akin to that of comic books. Alexis Kavyrchine (Perdrix, La Douleur, Ce qui nous lie) was in control of the cinematography. He discusses the way the filmmaker works in order to construct his unique and personal universe. (FR)

Born in 1995, Haya Khairat is an Egyptian cinematographer and director who has been working for the past ten years, mainly in her country. Dividing her work between commercials, music videos, short fiction films and TV movies, this year she has been awarded the Angénieux Special Encouragement, along with Barry Ackroyd, BSC. She talks to us about the spark that ignited her passion, her journey, and being a woman filmmaker in the Middle East. (FR)

Before he was fêted within the temple of French cinephilia, Darius Khondji agreed to participate in a particular sort of interview during which we asked him to react to a series of surprise images. The DoP of Delicatessen and Seven discussed some of his memories, inspirations, anxieties, and passions with us. (FR)

Darius Khondji, AFC, ASC, is collaborating with Woody Allen for the fifth time on Irrational Man, an official Out of Competition selection at the 68^th Cannes Film Festival. _ Having most recently worked on several period pictures—James Gray’s The Immigrant, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Magic in the Moonlight, and The Devil You Know, a pilot for a series directed by Gus Van Sant—Darius admits finding great pleasure in returning to a contemporary universe.

Starring Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Eileen Atkins, French release: 22 October 2014.
Magic in the Moonlight: the witching hour, spiritualism, and flying mattresses. Director of photography Darius Khondji, AFC, ASC discusses his fourth film with Woody Allen.

Since his beginnings as a director of photography in the early 1990’s alongside Jean-Pierre Jeunet and FJ Hossang, Darius Khondji, AFC, ASC, has developed an international reputation through his work on films by some of the greatest directors on both sides of the Atlantic. His impressive filmography includes David Fincher’s Seven, Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights, or Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen. Today, he is competing in the 65^th Cannes Film Festival with his film Love, directed by Michael Haneke.
This is his second film with this great director, following Funny Games in 2007.

Selected in the Orizzonti section at the Venice Film Festival, the fifth film by director Carine Tardieu deals with the theme of family ties, over a two year period following a tragedy. From its first scenes, L’Attachement is characterized by a mother’s loss, yet the film manages to avoid the pathetic thanks to the luminous, innocent performance of the character of Elliot by 6-year-old César Botti. Elin Kirschfink AFC, SBC, was director of photography for this film produced by Fabrice Goldstein and Antoine Rein (KarKaré Productions). (FR)

For her first film, filmmaker Ameen Nayfeh chose to plunge her viewers into the Kafkaesque experience of daily life in Palestine. Separated from his wife and children by 200 meters (she lives and works on the other side of the wall, in Israel), Mustafa has no choice but to communicate with them every evening by a childish game of turning the lights on and off. But when his son is the victim of an accident, he tries to gain access to the Jewish State by any means possible. Elin Kirschfink, AFC, SBC, was the cinematographer of this audacious testimony, which already received the Audience Award at the Venice Film Festival this year. (FR)

The 2024 winner of the Pierre Angénieux Special Encouragement Award is of Estonian origin. She has been based in the USA for 12 years, spending time in China first, just after finishing high school. This was her first experience living abroad, where she studied, learned a bit of the language and shot her first documentary films. Kadri Koop is a curious young woman, with varied experiences around the world, now working between Europe and Hollywood, where she resides and tends to a beautiful vegetable garden under the Californian sun.
She’s here at Cannes to talk to us about images, faces and zoom lenses! (FR)

A steroid-enhanced variation on a classic piece of fantastic literature (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray or Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin), The Substance offers director Coralie Fargeat the opportunity to bring two 1980s superstars back into the limelight—and to pour thousands of blood gallons onto the Grand Théâtre Lumière screen. While homages to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo are instantly recognizable, British cinematographer Benjamin Kračun also cites Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, two other major studio films. He further explains how this strange film, which every single shot smells California , was entirely made in France, between Paris and Nice. The Substance is in competition for the 77^th Palme d’Or. (FR)

Stéphane Kuthy, SCS, is a Franco-Swiss cinematographer who lives and works in Zurich. He has shot over fifteen fiction features and about twenty documentary features with the likes of Bettina Oberli, Emily Atef, Georges Gachot and, recently, Mano Khalil, a Swiss director of Kurdish origin. The latter’s film Neighbors is Kuthy’s entry to this year’s Camerimage festival, in the Cinematographer’s Debuts Competition. The film is a reconstitution of life in a Kurdish village on the border between Turkey and Syria in the early 1980s. Mixing humour and drama, this is the story of a young boy’s life in this rapidly changing country divided by an arbitrary border. (FR)