2 programmes

20 films

Carte blanche to Nuits sonores (DB1)

For fifteen years, the Arty Farty team has been programming the festival Nuits sonores with conviction, rigor and a spirit of openness.

In addition to its musical initiatives, from its very beginning the festival has thrown its weight into images. On the one hand by keeping up to date on the link between music and images through the festival’s stage design, but also by including regular screenings as part of Nuits sonores: videos, documentaries, short films, musicals…

From Jackie Berroyer’s Cut-Ups to the emergence of techno music, from the documented history of Madchester to a night of “Cinema and electronic music” at the Insitut Lumière, the festival itself has been the subject of a great many documentaries, reportages and appropriations of all sorts since its inception.

So the Arty Farty team eagerly accepted the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival’s invitation to create a “Carte Blanche” programme hoping to give back some portion of their constantly exuberant work on images.

Through its different projects, Arty Farty aims to mirror the complexity of our society, made up of both creative as well as struggling youth.

From Arab springs to electro-punk, from creative industries to democratic movements, our selection is marked by passion, exchanges, urgency and desire. It is one way of paying homage to a young generation that is making something, a committed generation that counts.

(Beautiful People – Michal Marczak)

Decibels! (DB2)

This year, Decibels! would like to propose a second programme framed by the needs of this exuberant generation. In this programme, image is at the service of a musical call that reflects the great variety of its creators’ urgent concerns.

We’re talking about the need for truth, violence towards the political class, the explosive loss of trust that Maxenss’ words explore, and Sam Pilling‘s camera in the video “Nobody Speak” by DJ Shadow.

We’re talking about the pressing need for poetry in Michal Marczak‘s ethereal march that towards a sort of infinite, unreal, temporally suspended paradise.

We’re talking about the need for dreams, like the fleeting one in Bill Morrison‘s Dockworker (Morrison‘s films have been selected several times at Clermont-Ferrand, and the filmmaker was part of the Lab Jury in 2014), or old Avalanche Bob‘s dream, which he, unlike the new generation, still believes in and lives to the fullest, which is good for a smile.

We’re also talking about alienation, which can transform faces through the freedom of the short format – Cate Blanchett’s for example, as remodelled by John Hillcoat (The Proposition, 2005 / The Road, 2009). The resulting bodies are rebuilt and ever so lonely, nostalgic characters like the one in the video by the Tindersticks, who are back in Decibels!with “How he entered“, which was co-directed by Richard Dumas.

(Avalanche Bob – Rafael Bergamaschi)

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