The 46th edition of the La Rochelle International Film Festival opened this Friday, June 29. For ten days, nearly 200 films will be screened in 14 theaters, enough to satisfy the most cinephiles among you.
Very dense program for this 46th edition of the international film festival of La Rochelle. This year and for ten days, lovers of the seventh art will be able to walk the streets and cinemas of the city to enjoy some 200 films. Between retrospectives, exhibitions and discoveries, this festival "without awards" is by far an unmissable event for all film lovers!
Created in 1973, it defines itself as "eclectic, geographically and thematically diverse, demanding and balanced" by maintaining "its refusal of competition, prizes and jury, in a desire for comparison rather than confrontation", according to the organizers. For its 45th anniversary last year, the festival attracted 90,072 spectators around 161 feature films and 40 short films presented in 347 screenings, a record attendance.
A busy schedule to the delight of film lovers
In a cinephile and relaxed atmosphere, this 46th edition of the La Rochelle International Film Festival takes up its classics. It offers various retrospectives of works by great authors. The first will celebrate through twenty films one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, the Swedish Ingmar Bergman (1917-2007), on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. Another will honor the "funny ladies of silent cinema" of the 1920s in nine films, while a last one will be dedicated to the French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901-1999) with thirteen feature films screened.
In parallel, a special tribute will be paid to three directors. Eight films by Frenchman Philippe Faucon, César for Best Film in 2016 for Fatima, will be proposed to reflect on the fate that society reserves for the most fragile. The Finn Aki Kaurismäki will see the complete of his feature films, including the latest: The Other Side of Hope (2017). Finally, Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel herself will travel to La Rochelle to meet her audience and present a preview of "Zama", her latest film.
Bulgarian cinema in the spotlight
As usual, the festival promotes films from all over the world. Thus, forty unreleased films or in preview will be offered to the French public. If eclecticism and diversity are obviously at the rendezvous, a highlight is focused this year on Bulgarian cinema. Twelve emblematic films, eight of which were previously unreleased in France, will come to celebrate this "new generation of filmmakers who, through fiction or documentary, reveal the wounds of Bulgarian society: corruption, the grip of the mafia, social misery, the post-communist legacy… ", according to the organizers. They add about animation filmmaker Theodore Ushev, a Bulgarian-born Canadian whose eight films will be offered, that he "works on shapes, colors and reinvents graphic design to make hypnotic films, surrealist poems and musicals".
Cinema for young and old
Just a few weeks after the 42nd edition of the Annecy Animation Film Festival, the La Rochelle Festival is also honouring this cinematographic genre, to the delight of young and old. In this regard, nine animated films from Aardman Studios, particularly famous for their clay characters Wallace and Gromit or Shaun the Sheep, will be shown in theaters.
Documentaries are not to be outdone: seven films will present artists "at work" like Picasso by Henri-Georges Clouzot, but also Philip Glass and John Cage by Peter Greenaway or Marina Abramovic by Matthew Akers.
Finally, since music and cinema continue to rub shoulders, the festival has chosen to celebrate this unique link through cine-concerts or the silent films of the retrospective "Drôle de dames" accompanied by the piano.For more details, visit the official website of the festival.
In short, the festival once again fulfills the expectations of its spectators by offering diverse films that will satisfy everyone. At Justfocus, we can only advise you to take a trip to La Rochelle and enjoy this unmissable cinema event. You have until July 8th!
