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Study case : How do the international actors of the industry embrace and relay The Film Foundation's initiatives?

This Tuesday morning, the MIFC hosted a case study on the Film Foundation's partners to better understand how the international players in the industry are embracing and relaying the organization's initiatives. 

Table ronde Film Foundation 

Moderated by CinemaTeaser's editor-in-chief, Emmanuelle Spadacenta, the case study on the Film Foundation brought together Margaret Bodde, its executive director, Cecilia Cenciarelli, head of international projects at the Cineteca di Bologna and co-director of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, Mark Hirzberger-Taylor, CEO of Park Circus, Gian Luca Farinelli, director of the Cinematheque of Bologna, Vincent Paul-Boncour, co-founder and director of Carlotta Films and Rosalie Varda, producer for Ciné Tamaris.   

After presenting the Film Foundation and its missions during her keynote yesterday, Margaret Bodde began this case study by reminding us of the importance of having quality partnerships with the actors of the sector in different countries. This quality is not only from a financial point of view, but also from the point of view of the philosophy and values surrounding heritage cinema. A position fully shared by Cecilia Cenciarelli, who recalled that the will of restoration, which the Cineteca di Bologna deals with, often comes from very different voices, coming from rights holders, academics and even filmmakers themselves, who want to share their influences, in the pure line of what was originally the project of Martin Scorsese and his friends in creating the Film Foundation. She also points out that these restorations, beyond the work, involve human responsibilities. "You have to be multilingual, not only from a linguistic point of view, but also to understand the intentions and cultural motivations behind each restoration. It is a question of rights, legal rights and moral rights," she added, emphasizing the pleasure and pride of seeing a film, in addition to having an international career, being rediscovered by its own country of origin. And according to the international projects manager, these reflections are possible with a partner like the Film Foundation. With 4 to 5 restoration projects per year, the Cineteca is one of the privileged partners of the organization with which it shares a taste for work well done, in depth. As Gian Luca Farinelli points out: « It's a complex and collective work. It's always about big, unique projects around works like Luchino Visconti's Il Gattopardo or Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, which would be impossible without the Film Foundation's contribution. And the essential eye of Martin Scorsese, passionate and precise in his quality control of restorations ».

For his part, Vincent Paul-Boncour, who distributed Mohammad Reza Aslani’s The Chess Game of the wind this summer in France, told his experience with the Film Foundation. An experience that began with having a spectator shock when discovering the film at the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, recalling in passing the importance of the big screen to discover these works, little or not known, in the best possible conditions. Immediately, the will came to share this important film and the editor to contact the Film Foundation, which had the international rights, to organize a distribution in France, first in theaters and then in physical video. He then explained that it was his job as a distributor to work on this film "no more difficult than any other because it is almost a novelty" to attract exhibitors, journalists and ultimately the public. In total, since its release on August 18, The Chess Game of the wind has made 12,000 admissions. 

Mark Hirzberger-Taylor then went on to talk about the missions of Park Circus, which has a catalog of over 25,000 films. For the CEO, the important thing is to make these films available, in the best possible conditions, to all audiences, and for this the Film Foundation was a powerful ally. On a more personal note, Rosalie Varda recounted how, in 2007, she went to Marrakech with her mother, Agnès Varda, to meet Martin Scorsese, who was there to present the very first film restored by the Film Foundation, Transes by Moroccan director Ahmed el-Maanouni, which was screened in Jemaa el-Fna Square, in order to ask for his support, and that of the Film Foundation, for the restoration of several of her works from her American period: Uncle Yanco, Black Panthers, Lions Love and Mur Murs. A trip undertaken with pleasure because as the director of Cléo de 5 à 7 had said with humor « We needed to eat couscous ». From there, the organization took in hand the restoration of these works, which took one year. In particular, to find the financing that the Film Foundation found with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), which they bullied a little, saying that if they wanted Martin Scorsese present for one of their fundraisers, they had to give part of it to the restoration of Agnès Varda's films. The latter was then able to travel to Bologna to supervise the work on her works. As a thank you, the director also set up an installation at Lacma, creating a shack made entirely of the negative of Lions Love that had just been numerized and restored. 

At the end of the conversation, Emmanuelle Spadacenta asked the whole panel, his opinion on the situation of the Hong Kong cinema, plagued by a new law on censorship that will decide which local films that violate or not the law on national security in Hong Kong. Gian Luca Farinelli replied in a bittersweet tone that the advantage of the global circulation of cinema is that many of the films that will be blocked are already kept outside China, even if it doesn’t that everything will be saved. He also pointed out with a touch of irony that censorship always turns against the censor and that this desire to suppress a part of Hong Kong's heritage will only increase people's interest in it. Jokingly, he ended by praising the Chinese government's cinephilia and its tenacity in considering cinema as a dangerous weapon. 

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