There is a kind of country very small, so small that it looks a bit like a theater scene. It is inhabited two or three times a day by its people. The inhabitants are small. If they live according to laws, they do not stop to question them and fight violently about it. This country is called “The Court” and its people “The Children”.Read More »
Claire Simon’s The Competition (Le Concours) begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of the Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son, or, as it’s more popularly known, La Fémis. One of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals, every year La Fémis attracts hundreds upon hundreds of applicants hoping to fill only forty annual slots. This new film by Simon, one of France’s premiere nonfiction filmmakers, offers a unique look into the process whereby those lucky forty are selected—a process involving examiners from the French film industry which is highly personal and idiosyncratic and subject to the vagaries of taste and personal prejudice.Read More »
A small picturesque Provençal village. Certainly, I grew up there, but today life seems to have somewhat deserted it. Except for the car and motorcycle repair garage where everyone, I mean the men, come to have their car serviced. What do they do? What do they talk about? A breakdown develops into a nail-biting suspense, the garage becomes the place of masculine transmission. Men are amongst themselves and repair metal bodies.Read More »
In an industrial zone of the city of Nice, Jihad is starting a factory making ready meals. His employers Fahid, Toufik, Madanni, Marouan and Gisèle share different tasks and struggle to keep the “Coûte que Coûte” company in business.Read More »
Claire Simon portrays an important time for any individual, from 16 to 18 years of age.
Set in the Paris suburbs in high school (for those lucky enough to go), teenagers chat after and even during class, sitting in the hallway or outside on a bench, looking at the city below them.
Claire Simon sets up a cinematic dialog with the teens, speaking about their personal history, their family, but also passions and loneliness.Read More »
“Mimi isn’t a star, she’s just someone. I wanted to make a film about her life. That is, about the life of… someone. I wanted to follow as closely as possible the singularity of a real life in order to encounter its own particular romance, fantasy. Things that I’d discover when filming. In Nice, her hometown, or in the mountains, drifting between familiar and unfamiliar places where I filmed her, I waited for this story as yet unknown to me to come back to Mimi and for her to recount the scenes that make up her personal novel.”
Claire SimonRead More »
The Woods is a deep investigation of both people and place. Whether it’s Gay men crossings for sex in the rain, out a hermit who makes his home deep in a remote section of the park, everywhere humans are busily going about their businessRead More »
