2014 Édito Édito
“The first years of this century have been particularly tortured and turbulent, seeming to announce both a promise of brighter future possibilities and a threat of retreat and obscurantism. The struggle for power in politics and society stokes conflict but also sharpens resistance.” These are the words with which we introduce the first workshop devoted to images of uprisings and revolutions, as an indication of the need to question cinema time, the time of its confrontation with a sometimes crushing present and that of a recovering of one's spirits or of an immersion which must find a balance between distance and impression. This apparent antagonism reminds us of another necessity: that of engagement. This must be repeated and its significance which translates into acts cannot be underestimated.
For this twenty-sixth edition of the États généraux du film documentaire, we have decided to strongly signal our support for the ongoing protest movement by the French “intermittents du spectacle”. During the first day, we will stop afternoon projections early in order to gather in a meeting space around a discussion: “Precarity is not cinema”. We have organised this public debate with the help of Olivier Pousset, director and member of the Coordination des intermittents et précaires d'Île-de-France. We have invited Denis Gravouil, General secretary of the CGT Spectacle Federation, and Mathieu Grégoire, sociologist, expert to the mission of concertation on intermittence, who will explain and debate the consequences of the approval of the Unedic agreement and the importance of the stakes of ongoing consultations. In 2003, a reform on the regime concerning artistic intermittents made access conditions more difficult and reinforced the precarity of the most fragile industry workers. How can we understand or interpret the fact that the proposals made by the follow-up committee on the reform of the unemployment indemnity paid to intermittent workers have not even been heard? Under the pressure of the first strikes, demonstrations, actions, declarations and positions—everything that participates in a movement—a concertation mission has finally been set up. This is a minimum and we await with interest the results of its reflections whose consequences, we know, can significantly exceed the unique regime of the intermittents du spectacle.
This year, under constraint this time, we have also taken the decision to close a projection space to compensate for the heavy loss of an European subsidy whose new criteria do not correlate with the goals set by the États généraux du film documentaire. The festival must, above all, remain a space for reflection and meeting, a place where practices and experiences of film are shared and discussed. Lussas must remain a space for criticism, a site where films are invented and where people leave with the desire to create.
Pascale Paulat and Christophe Postic