For the most part, they belong to the thirty-something generation of French
filmmakers who swim against the current, and began their careers as musicians,
screenwriters, and actors. They are a generation of antiglobalists and engaged
filmmakers who came of age on the auteur margins, and created many different
genres – from satire to dramas of documentary style that flirt with social
issues.

Legendary French producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier said that film is to
television as haute couture is to pręt a porter. Even though this
formula was more a reflection of his wishes than of reality, Toscan often
repeated it for two reasons: firstly, because its strategy in emphasizing
differences relied on the famous exception culturelle, and secondly,
because its author proved that it can become the reality. Toscan was a man who
favored not only the French; as a producer, he took under his wing many
Russians, Italians, Iranians and Chinese. Those authors were often undesirable
in their own cinematography due to censorship or their futile search for
capital, but Toscan always allowed them to remain Russian, Italian, Iranian and
Chinese.

If with Toscan’s premature death Parisian film haute couture lost its
production guru, then pręt a porter still relies on the generous tycoon
Luc Besson, the man who made Jeanne d’Arc talk in English and walk like she just
stepped off of a fashion catwalk. Besson believes that French film can evolve
only if it follows the Hollywood model.

Where in this hierarchy should we place the six young French debutants whose
films are shown in this intriguing program, Revue of the First, which is a sort
of an extended hand of the Zagreb Festival of the First? They belong to
street fashion. For the most part, they belong to the thirty-something
generation of French filmmakers who swim against the current and began their
careers as musicians, screenwriters, and actors (Guillaume Canet played a role
in Danny Boyle’s The Beach). They are a generation of antiglobalists and
engaged filmmakers who came of age on the auteur margins, and created
many different genres – from satire (Bitton, Canet) to dramas of documentary
style that flirt with social issues (Curval, Lienard). Therefore, these authors
owe a lot to the great Claire Denis and Robert Guediguian. They have found
themselves on the same wild side of the street on which the talented
Gilles Marchand, Sebastien Lifshitz, Mathieu Amalric, Claire Doyon and Alain
Guiraudie roam.

Their motives range from dissection of the morally degrading television industry
(Canet) and flirting with queer aesthetics (Honore), all the way to the
psycho-sociological analysis of state institutions such as mental hospitals
(Breitman) and female prisons (Lienard). Nevertheless, their common
characteristic is their diametrically opposed relationship towards the body.
While Christophe Honore prefers the ultimate (homo) eroticism of space and body,
Julie Lopes Curval plays her cards well on the pacifist resistance of body in
its relation to the space that it is placed in. Benedicte Lienard (Un part de
ciel) goes even further, intertwining the destinies of two groups of women –
workers in the bakery and prisoners who are exploited as unpaid labor - that
seemingly have nothing in common. The messages of Lienard’s revolutionary
syndicalism are clear and indisputable: the factories to the workers and prisons
to the prisoners. This is what happens between the sky and the sea in Lienard
and Curval’s films.

Ah! si j'etais riche exclaims the title of the likeable comedy by Michel
Munz and Gerard Bitton. The young French filmmakers presented in this program do
not burden themselves with such fantasies. They just wish to prove to us that
great films can be made even with a handful of euros. (Dragan Rubeša)