2018 retrospective: Dinner is served!

Even the French have reason to be impressed by the place that cooking now holds in contemporary society. It evokes notions of pleasure, well-being and health. It brings to mind heritage, the environment, society and upbringing. In movies, the spectacle of food is less about reproducing life than about pointing out its symbolic concerns. Concerns that are often of primary importance, such as sexuality, death, animal nature, and even social affiliations. Indeed, the rhetoric of table scenes contributes to the emergence of truth.

In Next Floor (2008), selected for the Lab competition at Clermont-Ferrand in 2009) by the Canadian Denis Villeneuve (creator of Incendies (Fires) (2010), Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), Sicario (2015), Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017)), the guests are surrounded by musicians as they eat, tear apart, suck, devour and swallow the dishes they are served at breakneck speed.

Next Floor trailer

On the menu are felines, giant armadillos, rhinoceroses and other wonderful atrocities filmed with such delicacy as to awaken feelings that lie somewhere between disgust and fascination. Close-ups of mouths, bones, eyes, meat. Properly seated around their table, the bloated guests at this curious ritual crash through successive floors below them… Unfazed, they begin again, spurred by the desire for limitless possession, by a violent frenzy to consume. Next Floor claims nothing and is open to every type of interpretation. Its visual power and direction, as regular as infernal clockwork, make it a work of remarkable coherence that leaves no room for indifference.

This year, we inivite you to four of our tastiest programmes, with nary a turkey in sight, where we’re cooking up a retrospective that will make the audience sigh with delight at the sight of all those little on-screen dishes.

Get ready to lick your celluloid chops!