2017 La Scam day La Scam day
The landscapes of “Brouillon d’un rêve”
Once upon a time there was… a bereaved snowy path, a school courtyard and its political geography, the depths of a cave in search of time, the office of an association defending women’s rights, a ghost town in Spain, the chaotic atmosphere of a family’s apartment, the endlessly long road for a survivor of prostitution, the by-ways of the memory of a filmmaker with heels of wind, Boulevard Jules Durand in Le Havre, the 6,999 doors, 3,150 windows and 28 kilometres of corridors of a Court House…
Once upon a time there were landscapes and… a territory: that of our ever-renewed faith in the documentary gesture. This is the territory we have crossed, opened, explored, and which the “Brouillon d’un rêve” development fund at La Scam (French Civil Society of Multimedia Authors) renders possible thanks to the collective will of its author-members and the commitment of Anne Georget, the society’s president until June 2017, of jury members Stéphane Mercurio, Anna-Célia Kendall-Yatzkan, Jacques Deschamps, Xavier Christiaens, and Régis Sauder, and of members of the reading commission Frédérique Pressmann, Cécile Vargaftig, Yamina Zoutat, Anna Feillou, Pauline Horovitz, Bernard Mangiante, Stéphane Manchematin, Vladimir Léon and Laurent Roth. In this way our aid fund for creation has been able to continue and assert our belief in the persistence of singular works within creative documentary.
While ninety new proposals received aid in 2016, some fifty odd “Brouillons d’un rêve” have been completed and seen by members of the jury and reading commission since the last edition of the États généraux du film documentaire. All have left traces, questions and have signed us with their shared dreams. Giving life to the paths sleeping in the silence, shining light on faces. Singing and dancing the utopia of living together. Life wants so much to be loved. What can you do with your dreams when you are twenty? Break with inherited curses. When does childhood end? A whole life-time to fill up a house and only a day to empty it… Feeling the music made up of the world’s noises, travelling within one’s body. Here, no stories are told, you let memory die away. Their voices resonate still… and remind us each year how important it is to be well accompanied all along the creative process, to have the right time to shoot, the right time to edit, to have the means necessary to meet the challenges… In all these films, fine struggles have been fought and we measure the extent to which the “Brouillon d’un rêve” development fund plays an increasingly important role for filmmakers in the completion of their work.
For this day devoted to screening the films which received development aid from “Brouillon d’un rêve”, we have been careful to cast light on those films considered fragile, sometimes fragile through the solitude of their creators who have borne them in their arms, sometimes with convictions opposed to a certain marketplace. These are films which are “rarely visible”, objects which tend to become a little exceptional, which grapple the Real with great delicacy, poetry, risk and courage. These are creators who are closest to the wounded and the invisible of our world. Eulogies to tenderness and empathy, pure enchantment, gestures of liberty, the talent and power of these creators is to change our way of seeing the world, without renouncing the singularity of their expression.
Unintentionally, we have chosen a good number of first or second films: almost first steps, like love letters, alongside other more affirmative and more radical voices. But with all these films, we are striding through questions of their creators’ commitment, their responsibility, and the intimate and political traces they leave. It is on this path that we take you.
Julie Bertuccelli
President of La Scam
Debates in the presence of the directors.