2017 Story of a Production: Survivance Story of a Production: Survivance
Friday, 25 at 2:30 pm, Salle Cinéma
Survivance is based today on two activities that are at once distinct and complementary: production and distribution. This double activity was the necessary translation of two rather different desires for cinema, for working with films. It is also the result of our two personalities. Production is often a long-term journey requiring patience and obstinacy, as close as possible to the authors, directors and other participants in the film. Distribution works on a shorter time frame and was imagined as the prolongation of film criticism, after the enchanted discovery of several films that we could not believe would never find their way into French cinemas. Distribution is thus the perfect counterpoint to production: the choice of a film means taking a rapid position which has nothing to do with the slowly maturing work of a producer. Until recently, Survivance did not distribute the films it produced, but a year ago, we started to distribute our own productions. This obliges us to continue the work of production by thinking about the best way to bring our films to the public. This is the case of Bricks, a film by Quentin Ravelli, which strives to deconstruct the economic crisis in Spain through the analysis of an object, the red brick, the ladrillo, ubiquitously present throughout Spanish construction. The film took four years to produce and will be released in October 2017. For several months, we have been tackling the question of bringing together the film, the public, and cinema programmers. It is a new task, undertaken with the director, who crucially needs support at this stage too. For the release of the film opens another passageway between our activities: distributing a documentary also means doing a lot of communication to the public about the conditions in which it was made.
Doing the production, then the distribution, is finally a guarantee of independence – Survivance was conceived as an ideal of artistic liberty free of economic constraints. Knowing the two sides of the profession allows us to imagine the life of our films, to elaborate for them in a kind of made-to-measure process the conditions of their distribution. In short, to prolong their life. That can’t be done by anyone but us.
Carine Chichkowski and Guillaume Morel
In the presence of Carine Chichkowski and Guillaume Morel.