There can be few more poignant or nostalgic films screening at this year’s DocLisboa than Léo Liotard’s It’s Party Time.
These days, Liotard works as a French teacher in Brussels but the documentary world-premiering in Lisbon was edited together from footage he shot on a Hi8 Camcorder in the late 1990s when he was a young student and he and his friends had their lives in front of them. He’d follow them around and film them at parties.
“When I was 16, we were studying cinema at high school and so we were watching a lot of movies,” the teacher remembers the days when he was a passionate Jim Jarmusch fan. He had seen a lot of indie movies about young slackers growing up, “filming themselves, doing nothing, just drinking coffee or something like that.” Now, he wanted to record his own life, and those of his friends, on camera.
Liotard remembers writing “rushes number 1” on the first tape that he shot with his video camera. He went on to shoot around 30 tapes but never did anything with them. He later moved away from his home town Drome, living in Lyons and Paris. He continued to film but once he moved to Brussels, he knew far fewer people. His career was going in another direction anyway and he was beginning to “live a different life.” He kept the tapes in a box for more than 20 years.
“It was a long time after, when a good friend of mine died eight years ago, that I started to watch the rushes,” Liotard says of why he revisited the footage. During the Covid crisis, he decided to edit it together into the movie premiering in Lisbon. “It was the lockdown. I had some time….”
At first, Liotard was working on the project alone. He had eight hours of footage. Eventually, he brought in an editor. She wasn’t a friend so could look on at the rushes with a detached, professional eye. “Together, we tried to construct something.”
Liotard is now middle-aged. “When I started to see my friends, it was really beautiful. When I was 35, watching these pictures, I was saying ‘it’s not cool, it’s a little bit dark, there is nothing [there].’ But to see these pictures after I was 40, I thought, OK, they are beautiful…I was thinking there was something really sweet in these pictures. It is not just the parties but the love and friendship.”
Like students all over the world, Liotard and his friends were young and sometimes pretentious. They drank too much. They talked about sex and relationships. They played music. They even danced around naked.
The director films himself in bed, video-diary style, holding forth on the world, sometimes nursing a hangover.
“Adolescence is a very narcissistic time of life,” he says as he looks back on these solipsistic moments. These days, he is far more interested in the lives of friends and loved ones than in himself. “[But] at 16,17, you say ‘me, me.’ I had this camera. It was also because I was drunk,” he says of the scenes in which he trains his camera on himself.
The editor insisted that the sequences should be included in the documentary. (If Liotard had been left to his own devices, he would have cut them out). He points out that he shows himself “naked in my emotions” and that if was going to put his friends on camera in such intimate settings, it was only fair he should expose himself as well.
“It is also really funny to see this young man speaking about love and girls,” he says of how he appears.
In the summer, the director organised an early, private screening for his friends. More than half of those featured in the documentary turned up to watch it. “They were very happy, laughing a lot.”
One of the old friends had refused to appear in the film but everyone else gave the project their blessing. “He had a difficult story in his life…he just said I don’t want to appear. I respect his decision.”
The others were happy to see the film and to be reminded of the old member of the gang who had died. Most didn’t remember Liotard filming them. They knew he had had his camera with him but they didn’t realise how much of their lives he was chronicling. “They’ve had a lot of different lives,” the director says of the friends today. A couple are musicians. Others have more conventional jobs.
“We were not poor. We were not rich. We were in a little city in the south of France,” Liotard reflects.
Liotard himself was involved briefly in the film industry. Through a friend, he did a few days second unit work on Jaco Van Dormael’s fantasy romance Mr Nobody (2009). Now, though, he is teaching students who are the same age he was when he was shooting all that footage of his friends. No, her hasn’t shown the students the film (he wasn’t keen for them to see the scenes of him dancing naked) but he would like young people to watch it.
Nowadays, everyone has cellphones and can record their lives at ease. However, few make films about their lives in the same painstaking way that Liotard did.
Now, It’s Party Time has been selected for a major festival and Liotard is drawing up plans to show the film in all the cities where his old friends now live.
Will he make another movie? “I don’t know yet. I am really, really happy to be in a beautiful festival like DocLisboa,” he says. “Maybe it will be the only movie in my life!”
