TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES
Sport and cinema |
With the support of the French Ministry of Culture and the Department of Maine-et-Loire
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| In the presence of Élie Grappe, Sacha Wolff and Kamal Ourahou, directors, Noée Abita, Anastasia Budyashkina and Toki Pilioko, actors, Sophie Charrier, Abdoullah Ait Bella, Oscar Constantin and Paul Bahin, sportsmen, Jean-Michel Frodon, Pierre Charpilloz and Bastien Moignoux, journalists, Louis Mathieu, Sébastien Farouelle, Pierre Pucelle and Dominique Terasas, film teachers and Christophe Le Gac, critic and teacher. |
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Feature films |
Cine-concert: On your marks, get set, burlesques! |
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In partnership with Printemps des Orgues As in the days of silent cinema, when hucksters, noisemakers and musicians accompanied the films, Swiss organist Guy-Baptiste Jaccottet improvises the musical score of 3 short films on the Hybrid Organ in Angers. |
LONG LIVE SPORT!
For families aged 5 and over
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Le sport s'anime |
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Carte blanche - PSSFF Festival - Feature films |
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Carte blanche - PSSFF Festival - Short films |
As the critic Serge Daney put it, sporting events have their own narrative: “A match, like a film, is a little story. Sometimlesothing can happen, just like in yesterday’s final between McEnroe and Lewis (6-2, 6-2, 6-2). You go through the motions of tennis, one wins and the other doesn't, but nothing happens. A tournament is already a great story. A year of tennis is a genuine saga. (Serge Daney, L'Amateur de tennis. Critiques 1980-1990, P.O.L.) The screenplays draw a structure capable of telling a story from reality, all the more so when they intersect with broader social and societal issues: racial discrimination (Ali), sexism (Bend It Like Beckham) or identity once the passion for the sport is no longer accessible (The Rider). The films tell personal stories intertwined with history. The representation of sport raises questions, as boxing champion Mohamed Ali feels in Michael Mann’s film. Feeling exploited by a state whose internal and external policies he rejects, Ali has fought all his life to abandon his slave name, Cassius Clay. With the strength of his fists, he destroys the shackles imposed on him and asks himself who he is and who he wants to become. “For some people of my generation, these were the most pressing questions,” said Mann, who uses a short period Ali’s career to describe his feelings about the world and its upheavals. In sports films, it is not always the sporting challenge that is the focus. In Jafar Panahi’s Afsaid (Offside), a group of women in Iran do everything they can to watch a football match, despite the fact that women are banned from entering the stadium. Jake LaMotta, in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, may be a great champion, but the film’s interest lies in the portrait of LaMotta’s self-destructive downward spiral, between moments of grace and unprecedented violence towards those around him. It is also a question of access to sport, depending on environment or social background. In Peter Yates’ Breaking Away, one of the characters movingly recalls his aborted football career. If there is a cliché of the sports film based on the model of popularity before the fall and inevitable rebirth, Stephen Show's Shaolin Soccer parodies it in a film somewhere between a cartoon and wu xia pan. Loyalty, honesty and the cult of ancestral values are on the side of the team of losers, but this only brings them misery and injustice. Cinema also allows us to come down from the grandstand to get up close to the athletes, as in Charlène Favier's Slalom and its impressive skiing scenes. The fact that Le Sommet des dieux (The Summit of the Gods) is made in animation means that Patrick Imbert can fully tell a story set in an environment that is difficult to film in any other way. Two stories where sportspeople can find that surpassing themselves is a blind spot for them in their quest. The passion for sport may be a cardinal value, often above all others for most of the characters in the films presented, but it will be sorely tested by a world that questions our deepest instincts and troubles us deeply. From yesterday to today, sport and cinema have attracted emotional, and sometimes astonished, views that can meet for a moment suspended in time. |