Un Film Dramatique
Director: Eric Baudelaire Run Time: 114 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2021
Starring: Anida Ait Abdesselam, David Pop, Fatimata Sarr
Country: France
Language: French and Romanian with English subtitles
“Baudelaire is able to weave these scenes of childhood discovery into a deeply textured work… of refreshing spontaneity and continuous revelation.”
– Jordan M. Smith for Nonfics
About the film:
Official Selection of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and Locarno Film Festival, where Director Eric Baudelaire was nominated for the Moving Ahead Award recognizing filmmakers exploring new forms of narration.
Offering a purposeful and playful new perspective on current socio-political realities, middle schoolers share their personal reflections on daily life and experiment with moviemaking equipment. They are the film’s subjects, and also its creators, seeking to answer the question, “what are we doing here together?”
Commissioned as a dedicated artwork for the newly constructed Dora Maar middle school in a diverse neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, Un Film Dramatique is a lively portrait of the first class to attend the school, filmed over the course of four years.
About the filmmaker:
Visual artist and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire is known for his experimental work exploring the relationship between images and events and fact and fiction to give new perspectives on global social and political issues. Based in Paris, he began his career in printmaking and photography before focusing on filmmaking in 2010.
His feature films have screened at film festivals around the world including Locarno, Toronto, New York, FID Marseille and Rotterdam. His debut feature, the 2011 Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi 27 Years Without Images, considers the role of art as propaganda through stories from the daughter of a terrorist and an activist filmmaker exiled in Lebanon. In his first narrative feature, the 2013 The Ugly One, two former resistance fighters in Beirut piece together their memories around narration from a member of the Japanese Red Army.
His work is in the collections of museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. Un film dramatique won the Prix Marcel Duchamp, the biggest art prize in France.
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