Genre cinema is often criticized because of its mysogyny and its objectification of women's bodies, yet it is also the genre that offers one of the broadest range of female characters. They are scream queens, sexual violence victims eager to fight, survivors whose mortality is intrinsically linked to virginal purity, possessed teenagers or angry witches. They are named Laurie, Carrie, Sidney, Kayako...

Behind the camera, the genre cinema is widely ruled by men, just like elsewhere. But during the last years, from It Follows to Get Out, new voices from the independent cinema seized the horror cinema's codes to transgress them better and to shade and expand them. Among them there are a lot of directors, including french ones. Recently, Julia Ducournau (Grave), Jennifer Kent (Mister Babadook), Caroline Fargeat (Revenge), Ana Lily Amipour (The Bad Batch). Before them, Claire Denis (Trouble Every Day), Marina de Van (Dans ma peau), Lucile Hadžihalilović (Innocence), Kathryn Bigelow (Les Frontières de l’aube).

Throughout a stylistic plurality, from the psychological thriller to the cannibal chronicle and going to the haunted house and Giallo but also animation, each of those female directors deconstruct on their own ways the genre stereotypes, whether it is cinematographic or human. It explicitly deals with the body, fluids, sexuality, femininity and masculinity, impulses (carnal, destructive, death), maternity, identity, multiples, complexes. It also deals with male domination, confronting the voyeuristic male gaze to the life-saving female gaze and all that with a good deal of thrill. Whether they are sanguine, horrific or metaphorical, their films show complex characters, in their wholeness, bringing a new saving nuance to the genre cinema.

Mélissa Blanco

This year in France two highlights enabled a love story with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's cinema. In the first time the theatrical release of Senses, in several episodes, and in the second time the selection of Asako I & II for the international competition of the Festival de Cannes. Two times thus to open Hamaguchi's book of passions similarly to the two phases covering several years of Asako's emotional life.

There is in Hamaguchi the « dur désir de durer » (heavy desire to last) that Paul Eluard talked about. The couples are filmed over time, in the first place their own time span (Will their story last ? For how long?) and then the one of the film (Senses and its 5h20 long which will be screened at once).

This program is built in two chapters with a romantic and fantastical esthetics in order to embrace the sensitivity of a filmmaker that we highly value.

In the first one, we will find what is mostly American in Hamaguchi, the mark of John Cassavetes, detectable in those staggering couples and in those women who reshuffle the cards of the traditional marriage. Senses is born in a country, apparently, deprived of #MeToo. In the second chapter, which is more evanescent, we will meet the doubles, the ghosts, the obsession and love possession. This two parts answer and complete one another just like soulmates.

Nathan Reneaud

“ I sometimes fancy correcting each word of presenters speaking lightly, without having any idea of the difficulty and of what they are evoking (…). Because these words are doing things, they create fantasies, fears, phobias, or just wrong representations. » Pierre Bourdieu, About television.

The filmmaker Alice Diop, who comes from human sciences, records documentaries after documentaries, a precious speech, because it is too much rare, throttling popular misconceptions.

Her cinema is the one of the « invisibles », of those who are stigmatized in dominant medias, and whose faces and stories are under represented in french cinema, whose identities and individualities are crushed behind « portmanteaus ». They are « migrants », « young people from suburbs » people politicians often talk about but to which floor is seldom given.

Films from Alice Diop are closely linked to a region, Seine-Saint-Denis where she grew up, and they put back humanity at the core of debates. In spaces often limited, from the faded bar of a building (La Tour du monde), a cramped medical office (La Permanence) to the corridors of employment centres (Clichy pour l'exemple), the filmmaker records stories and life courses, captures faces and looks, records the indescribable, everyday racism (La mort de Danton), state violence and manliness stereotypes (Vers la tendresse, César for the best 2017 short film). From her films emerge a dull anger and a heartbreaking humanity, mingling an impactful sociological vision with a very subtle moulding. French cinema is undoubtedly very lucky to have such a fascinating filmmaker.

Mélissa Blanco

Kleber Mendonça Filho is the leading figure of the Recife cinema, the director of two big feature-length films (Les Bruits de Recife, Aquarius) and he does us the honor of planning four films. Four pieces of work which reflect him very well and which establish a thrilling discussion with his work. We know the acuity of Filho's eye about the brazilian society, and more generally about a world made of tensions and divisions. Being a filmmaker and a film buff but also a movie critic and a festival planner, he is in the best position to talk about this carte blanche.

Nathan Reneaud

Kleber Mendonça Filho

So, I have been given the opportunity to choose four films for my carte blanche in Bordeaux. Thank you. As I understand, it is a chance to share these choices both as films in public screenings and also as personal experiences of mine. I picked these four films which might result in some fine discovery in some rainy festival day. They are quite recent in terms of Cinema History, and I suspect they are interesting points of view on what we are all living today in the world. They all have their admirers, but I also believe they should be more widely seen and recognized. They are films that made me want to make films. 

Emmanuel Carrère is a filmmaker and writer who mingles real and fiction, the private to the facts, the historical to the miscellaneous. His unclassifiable work flirts with cinema, his books adapted by big figures of cinema on the basis of his storylines: La Classe de neige by Claude Miller, L’Adversaire by Nicole Garcia, and soon Limonov by Paweł Pawlikowski.

In 2003, he starts filming as a director with the documentary Retour a Kotelnitch and later on the adaptation of his eponymous novel, La Moustache. Thereon, Emmanuel Carrère says “If I had to shoot films again, I would make documentaries again, or a film of which mechanism allows unexpected things to happen.”

It is this mishap that attracts us in the carte blanche scheduled by Emmanuel Carrère.

It is in this mechanism which refuses traditional codes that dwell the trembling and fragility that make emotion and magic rise in the creation process.

Emmanuel Carrère, former cinema critic, is also a huge cinephile very keen on science-fiction. He proposes here to present a dystopian work of a great mastering and cinematic virtuosity : Les Fils de l’homme of Alfonso Cuarón.

Those two films are two extreme approaches of cinema creation and are yet connected about emotion and the intangible. And what if there was no border between fiction and real ? What if instead of this border was the place where science-fiction dwells ? What is right, what is wrong ? Does it really matter ?

Johanna Caraire

Shis is Salvador Dali's muse, disco singer, television presenter, model for Paco Rabanne, comedian, immortal wearing a bibi hat and accompanied by a panther on the album cover For Your Pleasure of Roxy Music, painter, Grosses Têtes resident, Amanda Lear is a familiar face of our cultural and audiovisual landscape for almost 40 years. But she remains elusive. Is this because we ignore her year of birth? Is this because she flits about a career to another with this ambiguous charm and this classy aplomb of a military child? This year the fifib hopes to unveil her cinephile face giving her a carte blanche with three films of her choice and that she will present, between showy past (The red shoes of Michael Powell), deadly glamor (Vertigo of Alfred Hitchcock) and intriguing conditional (the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, about the failed version of a science-fiction great classic in which Amanda Lear should have played in the 70's). Hail to the Queen Lear!

Léo Soesanto

The FIFIB organizes an artistic residency for filmmakers from francophone countries.

The francophone residency is focused on emergence and hosts all kinds of short-film projects whether it is fiction, animation or creative documentaries... The residency takes place at Château de Saint-Maigrin (Charente-Maritime) from the 30th of September up until the 9th of October and ends up with the restitution of the work done as part of the international corproduction forum of the festival, the 10th and 11th of October, 2018.

The forum includes a synopsis contest in front of producers and broadcasters and is followed with professional meetings.

The specificity of this residency is to direct the work sessions towards artistic creation in order to tangibly progress on the shooting preparatory phase with guests and/or collaborators chosen by the laureates.

Each laureate gets a 1.000€ grant.

The filmmaker Meryem Benm’Barek is the patron of this first year.

The laureates of the 2018 C.L.O.S are :

+ OUSMANE DIAGANA / Mauritanie / L’HÉRITIER / Merveilles Productions / Fiction

+ JUSTINE HARBONNIER / Québec, France / CAITI BLUES / Sister Productions / Documentaire 

+ SANDY KOUAMÉ / Côte d’Ivoire / DEN’I (L’enfant) / Merveilles Productions / Fiction

+ AMOS NJITAM / Cameroun / THE PET / Dieudonné Assougué Alaka / Animation

+ TOM OUÉDRAOGO / Burkina Faso / GÉNÉRATION CONSCIENTE / Julien Vicaire / Fiction

+ LÉA TRIBOULET / France / MAÏSSA / KinoElektron / Fiction

For the third year in a row the Festival International du Film Indépendant de Bordeaux hosts ‘Talents en Court’, in partnership with the CNC, the Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine et Talents en Court Nouvelle-Aquitaine / Poitiers (Poitiers Film Festival).

This program supports young authors having a short-film project and allows them a better grasping of the professional sphere while initiating a reflection on the creative process.

The laureates will thus be invited to live a unique experience during the festival from the 9th to the 15th of October, 2018. At the end of their stay they will present their projects to the public and the professionals during a synopsis session.