Cinéma du reel has unveiled details of the six ParisDOC Works-in-Progress screenings that will take place on 26 and 27 March at the Alliance Française de Paris. Works-in-Progress screenings are accessible upon registration only to professionals with a distribution and film-placement activity: festivals, sales, TV, theatrical and web distribution.
The projects are:
- Anatomy of a Portrait by Mattia Colombo and Francesco Clerici (Italy, Switzerland). Logline: An actress and an art historian meet in a recording studio in an attempt to record the voice-over for a biographic film about the first woman to ever direct a museum in Italy. In the presence of the hundreds of letters from her personal file, they try to reconstruct the tone of the lost voice.
- Bahía Honda by Alejandro Alonso (CXuba, France, Norway). Logline: Pitufo, a young Cuban shipbreaker, dreams of escaping the remote bay where he spends his days amid fire and cut metal. In search of his freedom, he ventures into the graveyard of vessels, a place where his longings begin to take shape.
- Barbara Forever by Brydie O’Connor (USA). Logline: An exclusive look at the iconic life, work, & legacy of pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, tracing her prolific canon alongside never-before-seen documentations of her life and body, to reveal Hammer’s unconventional attempts to live on forever.
- Filipinas by Leonor Noivo (Portugal, France). Logline: One third of the Filipino population currently lives and works abroad. Most of the Filipino women who set out in search of a better life work as housemaids, taking care of other people’s children and leaving their own children behind in their homeland.
- Imago by Déni Oumar Pitsaev (France, Belgium). Logline: I have been offered land in Pankisi, Georgia, a valley set against the Caucasus on the other side of Chechnya, the country where I was born. An exile, I contemplate building a house in this region, dwelled by descendants of my Chechen clan. How could I inhabit such a place?
- Crossing the Mountains (WT) by Manon Ott and Grégory Cohen (France, Italy). Logline: On the French-Italian border near Ventimiglia, Juliette, Ali and Téo organize themselves to support exiles seeking to cross the border. Through their daily lives, a territory, between the sea and the mountains, made up of repression and resistance, gradually takes shape; an occupied zone as much as a land of solidarity and freedom.
ParisDOC writes how, of the 70 Work-in-Progress films shown over the past 12 years, 80% have been featured in at least one international festival and 70% have been picked up by an international distributor or sales company. “ParisDOC is closely attuned to the evolution of filmmaking and viewing practices, and to the considerations and challenges at play within the trade. It is the festival’s laboratory.”
“Over the last few years, ParisDOC has broadened the scope of its operations to create a network that engages in discussions and concrete actions in the field of documentary filmmaking, from the development of a project all the way to a film’s distribution. It provides filmmakers, producers, distributors, festival networks and international sales agents with an organization tailored to their needs, offering individual support and dealing with topics relevant to a variety of practices,” organisers underline.
“Working to improve the distribution of independent documentary films, ParisDOC also aims to perpetuate the inventiveness, flexibility and unique quality of each film, as well as values of craftsmanship in an industry that is both vulnerable and prolific,” organisers continue. “The Public Forum, led by the association Les Amis du Cinéma du Réel, reflects the political concerns of an industry faced by growing threats and by the urgent need to create new opportunities. Created six years ago, Morning Sessions explores the entanglement of thinking and doing, tracing the history of the practices involved in documentary filmmaking. These sessions, in which established professionals are invited to share their experience, are designed to create connections between seasoned and emerging professionals.”
“First Contact, co-created in 2022 with Ateliers Varan and EURODOC, works alongside filmmakers reaching out to producers for the first time, and provides them with support that is once again ‘tailored’ to their needs.”
