50 films make up the competition sections (International, French, First Film, Flash and Cine+) of the 35th edition of FIDMarseille. Of these, 42 are World Premieres, 5 are International Premieres and 3 are French Premieres. The festival opens June 25 with Grand Tour by Miguel Gomes and closes June 30 with Alain Guiraudie’s Miséricorde.
In total 112 films from 38 countries are presented at FIDMarseille 2024, selected from 2807 submissions.
“This year, more than ever, the festival is taking place against a dark and violent backdrop. Since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine has endured the horrors of war. The appalling attack on Israel by Hamas has provoked a war of unprecedented violence, and the massacre of the Palestinian people in Gaza. FIDMarseille is, by nature and vocation, an echo chamber for the state of the world and, in the current context, for these disasters,” write organisers.
International Competition
- 7 Walks with Mark Brown by Vincent Barré, Pierre Creton. France | 2024 | 104′. World Premiere. Following the steps of an English botanist, in the landscapes of the Normandy coast, people and cameras look at flowers. This is an essay on attention and friendship, a cinematic herbarium.
- Bluish by Lilith Kraxner, Milena Czernovsky. Austria | 2024 | 83′. World Premiere. Errol and Sasha, two young women in their twenties, drift through their lives and the city. A study by fragments of existences waiting to happen.
- Day Is Night by Ghassan Salhab. Lebanon | 2024 | 345′. World Premiere. Lebanon, 2019-2023: a chronicle of the uprising, its fading and its end. From collective hope to intimate pain, can cinema resist the irreversible?
- Do You Want To See Part Two? by cricri sora ren. Germany, Russia, China | 2024 | 74′. World Premiere. What if Putin’s Russia in 2022 had never happened? Such is the hypothesis of this historical-hysterical dystopia, partly generated by AI, and driven by our political unconscious.
- It Is At This Point That The Need To Write History Arises by Constanze Ruhm. Austria, Portugal | 2024 | 96′. World Premiere. A number of women come together to discuss the thinking and history of Carla Lonzi, art critic and founder of Rivolta Femminile, a major and little-known.
- The Spirit of the Spider by Antonia Rossi. Chile | 2024 | 63′. World Premiere. Working with symbols, playing with shadows, questioning the points of reference of identity: a woman weaves her web in an abandoned factory to ‘poetically inhabit’ the world.
- If I Fall, Don’t Pick Me Up by Declan Clarke. Ireland | 2024 | 110′. World Premiere. Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer, and Walter Asmus, a German director, work together and become friends. Between archives and relics, fidelity and disappearance, the story of a relationship unfolds.
- Kunst der Farbe by Mariano Llinás. Argentina | 2024 | 90′. World Premiere. A filmmaker fails to portray an artist couple. Between music, painting and cinema, he achieves, however, an exceptional comedy of colours.
- Lazaro at Night by Nicolás Pereda. Mexico, Canada | 2024 | 76′. World Premiere. Three friends – a trio in love – get together after an audition. Their prosaic exchanges take a different turn when they remember how they met.
- Gold Songs by Ico Costa. France, Portugal | 2024 | 103′. International Premiere. He leaves to work in the gold mines of northern Mozambique while she waits for him. This DV-coloured fiction slips into the reality of Domingo and Neusia, young lovers.
- Amusement Park by Ricardo Alves Jr. Brazil | 2024 | 72′. World Premiere. Anonymous figures pass through the gates of a park at night, seeking adventure in its dark alleys. An amusement park is ruled by the laws of desire.
- Rizal’s Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge by Khavn De La Cruz. Philippines, Germany | 2024 | 92′. World Premiere. In this whimsical historical fresco, a counterpoint to today’s urgent political issues, the figure of the Filipino revolutionary Rizal is revisited in the light of early silent films.
- Every Document of Civilization by Tatiana Mazú González. Argentina | 2024 | 88′. World Premiere. A look back at the murder of a teenager by the Buenos Aires police, through the words of his mother and her obsessive observation of the place of his forced disappearance.
- Merman by Ana Lungu. Romania | 2024 | 85′. World Premiere. Alexandru Popovici is a man obsessed with women, whom he films relentlessly. This montage of family and anonymous archives questions the male gaze in the era of Romanian totalitarianism.
French Competition
- Critical Failure by Phoenix Atala. France | 2024 | 46′. World Premiere. In this corrosive satire, Phoenix Atala and his protagonists, engaged in the making of a decolonial queer Sci-Fi film, question the norm and the ways of emancipation.
- Festa major by Jean-Baptiste Alazard. France | 2024 | 70′. World Premiere. Four days of joy and friendship in a village in the Pyrenees. The festivities intensify life together, and cinema glorifies it.
- Frieda TV by Léa Lanoë. France | 2023 | 79′. World Premiere. A skin-deep portrait of Gerda Frieda Janett Gröger, with her high-spirited, punkish way with words, and her poetry that is wielded against all odds.
- Autumn Clothes by Yohei Yamakado. France, Portugal | 2024 | 45′. World Premiere. ‘Autumn Clothes’ is a short story by the writer Ichiyo Higuchi. The filmmaker proposes its attentive reading in a Portuguese flat where two friends are meeting.
- Harmony by Bertrand Dezoteux. France | 2024 | 74′. World Premiere. In this low-fi digital animation adventure, we follow the space mission of Jesus Pérez to the planet Harmony, inhabited by creatures of unknown shapes and a binary language.
- Rooms of Shadows by Camilo Restrepo. France | 2024 | 65′. World Premiere. Wartime. Hidden away in her bedroom, a woman verbally revisits key images from the history of art. Between shadows and memories, an imaginary museum is built to resist.
- The Night Next Door by Muriel Montini. France | 2024 | 52′. World Premiere. A forest where animals seem to live in harmony. In the distance, a man and a woman are having a conversation. In the distance, a war is raging.
- The Wolves by Isabelle Prim. France | 2024 | 94′. World Premiere. In the mid-18th century, the Beast is hunted around the Château de Saint-Alban. In the mid-20th century, a new kind of psychiatry is invented there. Theatre and madness span the centuries.
- PAN TO MINE by Michel S Zumpf. France | 2023 | 134′. World Premiere. From a poem by Antonin Artaud to the pantomimes of Pierrot, between Paris and London, this enchanting suite of musical drifts composes words and faces, beings and places.
- Voyage Along the War by Antonin Peretjatko. France | 2024 | 62′. World Premiere. Ukraine, summer 2022: a filmmaker makes the journey. He films the ravaged country, meets refugees and writes down his impressions. From the edge, he gets to the heart of life in a country at war.
First Film Competition
- The Outlandish by Tahar Kessi. Algeria, France, Qatar | 2024 | 118′. World Premiere. A dark and poetic portrait of Algeria. A paranoid and fragmented journey from the Black Decade to contemporary times, a journey between trauma and resistance.
- Welcome Interplanetary and Sidereal Space Conquerors by Andrés Jurado. Colombia, Portugal | 2024 | 95′. World Premiere. The random encounter between two American astronauts and an indigenous inhabitant in the Colombian jungle, a starting point for a counter-history of space conquest.
- Frieda TV by Léa Lanoë. France | 2023 | 79′. World Premiere. A skin-deep portrait of Gerda Frieda Janett Gröger, with her high-spirited, punkish way with words, and her poetry that is wielded against all odds.
- Lost Chapters by Lorena Alvarado. Venezuela | 2024 | 67′. World Premiere. When Ena returns to Venezuela, after spending several years abroad, she discovers a postcard in her father’s bookshop and sets off in search of the forgotten writer.
- A Suburban Mythologic by Alejandro Pérez Castellanos, Antonio Llamas, Jorge Rojas. Spain | 2024 | 70′. International Premiere. On the outskirts of a city, a man sleeps in his grocery store. A premonitory dream startles him; tomorrow the city will have changed forever and no one will remember how to get home.
- These Sounds Mark the Placements of an Inner World by Julia Pello. United States | 2024 | 63′. World Premiere. Between pages and a cabin, between land and water, words and gestures, an inner world opens up: that of Lorine Niedecker, an American poet, great among modernists.
- An Oscillating Shadow by Celeste Rojas Mugica. Chile, Argentina, France | 2024 | 77′. World Premiere. A father took photos during the Chilean dictatorship. His daughter plays with him in the darkroom, developing other images. Images to resist and invent other futures.
- XXL by Kim Ekberg, Sawandi Groskind. Sweden, Finland | 2024 | 77′. International Premiere. A road movie through the streets of Helsinki, full of humor and atmosphere. Enzo and his sister Magda confront a mix of dreams, reality and memories.
- Ulysses by Hikaru Uwagawa. Japan, Spain | 2024 | 73′. World Premiere
Flash Competition
- 102 Narra by Rafael Manuel, Tatjana Fanny. Netherlands | 2024 | 22′. International Premiere. In a gated community in Manila, in the heart of the co-director’s home, a tender and piercing depiction of family ties and social class relationships in their everyday life.
- Círculos Crescentes by Pedro Geraldo. Brazil | 2024 | 25′. World Premiere. In a small town in northern Germany, a young woman wanders and endures the winter. Driven by a desire for something new, she waits and turns in circles.
- Clubbing by Nataliya Ilchuk. Ukraine | 2024 | 37′. World Premiere. Two young women drag their existential questions in a play of mirrors, between the summer of 2019 and the summer of 2024 in a melancholic Lviv.
- Flamenco by Jean-Claude Rousseau. France | 2024 | 5′. World Premiere. ‘Her triumph was the dance named Flamenco. What a tragic dance! It is, so to speak, all passion expressed in three acts: desire, seduction, and pleasure.’ (Pierre Louÿs, The Woman and the Puppet, 1898)
- Land Without Words by Antoinette Zwirchmayr. Austria | 2024 | 37′. World Premiere. A translation into film of a play by Lea Doher. Men and women in constant movement share the words. What are the powers of art in today’s world?
- The Colloquy of the Dogs by Norman Nedellec. France | 2023 | 22′. World Premiere. Touched by the grace of speech, two dogs philosophize in a hospital car park, at night. Together, they paint a bleak picture of a humanity in the grip of a grand calamity, crumbling on the way our all too human certainties.
- Object Lesson by Herman Asselberghs. Belgium | 2024 | 34′. World Premiere. The object is the camera. Its description is the starting point for a reflection on the image – of oneself and of others – and on the time one has to lose in order to capture them.
- Leisure, Utopic by Beatrice Gibson. Italy, United Kingdom | 2024 | 2′. International Premiere. The first episode in a series of “adaptations” of poet Bernadette Mayer’s book Utopia. It is drawn from Chapter 4, entitled “The Arrangement: of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and so on.”
- Life Story by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli. United States | 2024 | 10′. World Premiere. An original text by philosopher McKenzie Wark is combined with the exploration of her naked body. The story of her life intertwines with that of the Left, both haunted by death.
- Shuruuk by Amie Barouh. France, Germany | 2024 | 36′. World Premiere. Shards of the world and fragments of life, between Japan and the Rom’s community, come together and respond to each other in a frenetic montage that is both gentle and rebellious.
- End of the West by Yotam Ben-David. France | 2024 | 16′. World Premiere. One evening, among decaying electric appliances, a man contemplates exile and fading traditions. His heart is in the east, while he himself is at the end of the west.
- A Circle that Rolled Away by Liv Schulman. France | 2024 | 35′. World Premiere. In the streets of Buenos Aires, men and women in T-shirts with protest words mingle with the crowd. Their succession composes a long poem against the slogans of capitalist urban space.
- Retracing the Same Streets by Beatriz Arias González. Chile | 2024 | 19′. World Premiere. The main character looks for a lost dog. An existential wandering through the streets of a working-class neighbourhood in Chile as a free, musical gesture. An ode to stray dogs.
- How Azure Is Dying by Egor Skorokhodov. Georgia, Armenia | 2024 | 19′. World Premiere. On the edge of a wordless world, deep in the misty mountains of the Caucasus, an old man watches the blue sky die and be reborn above him.
CINE+ Competition
- A Fidaï Film by Kamal Aljafari. Germany, Palestine, Qatar, Brazil, France | 2024 | 78′ . French Premiere. In Beirut, in 1982, Israeli authorities plundered Palestinian film archives. The film offers an experimental counter-narrative to a story of dispossession.
- Bluish by Lilith Kraxner, Milena Czernovsky. Austria | 2024 | 83′. World Premiere. Errol and Sasha, two young women in their twenties, drift through their lives and the city. A study by fragments of existences waiting to happen.
- Festa Major by Jean-Baptiste Alazard. France | 2024 | 70′. World Premiere. Four days of joy and friendship in a village in the Pyrenees. The festivities intensify life together, and cinema glorifies it.
- Room of Shadows by Camilo Restrepo. France | 2024 | 65′. Wartime. Hidden away in her bedroom, a woman verbally revisits key images from the history of art. Between shadows and memories, an imaginary museum is built to resist. World Premiere
- The Wolves by Isabelle Prim. France | 2024 | 94′. World Premiere. In the mid-18th century, the Beast is hunted around the Château de Saint-Alban. In the mid-20th century, a new kind of psychiatry is invented there. Theatre and madness span the centuries.
- Amusement Park by Ricardo Alves Jr. Brazil | 2024 | 72′. World Premiere. Anonymous figures pass through the gates of a park at night, seeking adventure in its dark alleys. An amusement park is ruled by the laws of desire.
- Pepe by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias. Republic, France, Namibia, Germany | 2024 | 122′ French Premiere. The true story of Colombia’s most famous hippopotamus, Pepe, from his childhood in Namibia to his forced exile in Colombia. A story told by his ghost.
- The Flame of a Candle by André Gil Mata. Portugal, France | 2024 | 109′. World Premiere. An antique house in northern Portugal. The story flows between the rooms and the ages of life. After the husband’s death, women stay to themselves.
- Every Document of Civilization by Tatiana Mazú González. Argentina | 2024 | 88′. Première Mondiale | World Premiere. A look back at the murder of a teenager by the Buenos Aires police, through the words of his mother and her obsessive observation of the place of his forced disappearance.
