Lee Isaac Chung, good morning. We are in Cannes for the 60th edition of the Festival. This is your first feature film; you have been selected in a very official competition. What are your impressions? It’s always been a kind of dream to play at this festival so I’ve always elevated it quite highly. A lot of my heroes have played here. But at the same time, coming here is interesting to see both sides of the Festival, to absolutely fall in love with the films but also to see this side of glamour that I wasn’t necessarily prepared for.…

Pas de projection presse pour Stomp the Yard, on cherche à éviter les critiques sévères des professionnels pour privilégier l’a priori positif des spectateurs et le bouche-à-oreille. C’est effectivement la démarche à adopter pour ce méga navet absolument prodigieux. Dès les premières images, on tombe en effet dans l’univers enivrant du  » stepping « , une des spécificités des universités noires américaines dont les petits-bourgeois enrôlés dans les multiples et puissantes fraternités imitent les danseurs virtuoses des ghettos, exclus de ce monde de privilégiés. Inutile de critiquer le scénario shakespearo-molièresque ou ses branches socio-politico-patriotiques. DJ le jardinier ne peut pas aimer…

In April 1994, Jean-Christophe Klotz was a journalist and film reporter, who thus filmed his subjects. He worked for independent agencies such as Sigma and Gamma. He was in Rwanda to film, then, but also because Bernard Kouchner needed a camera to bear witness to his attempt to mediate between the Rwandan army and Paul Kagamé’s Rwandan Patriotic Front in order to set up humanitarian corridors and stop the massacres. Thus, the goal was to mobilize the public by showing « anti-massacre » images, as the massacres spread around the country and notably in the capital of Kigali. In these early stages…

Abderrahmane Sissako’s « Bamako », officially selected out-of-competition at the 2006 Cannes Festival, was such a success with the festival-goers that for the second screening, after more than an hour’s wait, many people didn’t make it into the fully-packed Salle Buñuel. On the same day, interview of the film director by two enthusiastic critics.

« This film is based on real events and shot on the same spot where they happened ». This warning at the beginning of the film finds an echo before the final credits where pictures of the laughing faces of the film’s Rwandan colleagues scrolled down, who themselves have lost most of their family in the genocide, sometimes even in the same conditions that are described here. We are then in a reality legitimated by the actors themselves, that of the historical reconstruction on the spot, with those who have lived through it. And yet… Using the ingredients of actions films and…

Paul Rusesabagina is Hutu and is in charge of one of Kigali’s biggest hotels. Letting about a thousand Tutsis take refuge there during the 1994 Genocide, he succeeds in stopping the Hutu militia from coming to slaughter them. This is Terry George’s fiction choice to make this tragedy of African history accessible to a wide audience who, in its majority, still believes it was an ethnic conflict and doesn’t know its origin or the way things unfolded. The intention is honest and the result is fair: the film moves us in its sincerity, its reserve as regards to the representation…

In this film, there is tension that Hitchcock would have appreciated. Yet, Daratt is a film in which there is practically no music or dialogue and in which time is drawn out. But the heat of the dry season stimulates sensations and creates static in the air. Young Atim wants to avenge for his father by killing his murderer. Inside of him, he carries a rage that knows no bounds but is fuelled from afar: because the’Justice and Truth’ commission grants a general amnesty to the terrible acts of violence committed in Chad, his grandfather gives him a gun to…

100 Days, a fiction that deals with the massacres perpetrated in a church in Rwanda, exposes horror by showing it crudely. The images and editing are efficient; the suspense is maintained before the massacre, which is shown in all its cruelty. It stops at nothing in order to force emotion: zooms, filters, lighting, close-ups, slow-motion and hemoglobin. The blue helmets are ordered to leave the Tutsis behind in a church, French soldiers are accused of being racists and supporting extremists, children picked out from a classroom are burned alive in a gas station, a priest rapes a young woman…Even if…

A well-known documentary maker who has never set foot in Africa decides to go there to understand what is happening and what happened in Rwanda. He goes there ten years after the Genocide, ready to listen. His first stop is in Germany where he meets Esther, a survivor. Shot from the train, images of a flooded countryside set the tone: reality goes beyond fiction. First difficulty: the silence. We saw the catastrophe coming but we did not talk about it. Everyone sang a popular song, as if it were nothing: « Let’s exterminate them ». In the little Rwandan bus, Gheerbrant notes…

The following notes represent my summaries and reactions to a series of short films and feature films presented at the Vues d’Afrique film festival this year. The presentations were divided into the following sections: International long métrage fiction, international court métrage fiction; an homage to Henri Duparc (1941-2006), with showings of seven of his films. An international section of long and short métrage documentary films, and of international documentary films. What are called « films » are celluloid, which are distinguished from the next set of categories, « numérique » films. These include long métrage, court métrage, and then séries and feuilletons télé.

Un dimanche à Kigali, an adaptation of a novel by Gil Courtemanche, is more a film about a Quebecker journalist’s love for Africa than about the Rwandan Genocide. However, the will to evoke the genocide is obvious from the start, with images that recall its sparking off by the presidential guard and the army as soon as the President’s plane was brought down on April the 6th, 1994. The film is punctuated with historical elements that aim to show the key events: the lists asserting that it had been planned for a long time, the Western Powers’ negligence, the refusal…