La Femis celebrates Thirty Years
In February 2016, during the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, La Fémis will celebrate its 30th birthday with a slate of three programmes. Two of these will be dedicated to an overview of final projects from the Production Department, including Nicolas Lasnibat’s Treinta años which journeys to Chile in search of the past, and a funeral procession accompanied by an unusual band in Luc Meilland’s Les pieds devant. The third program, entitled “L’Enfer de La Fémis” (The Hell Behind La Fémis) will be dedicated to films from the Editing Department that were made using never before released archival footage. One such example is Sacha Basset-Chercot’s short film Détours which creates a composite American loser through a gallery of characters taken from films from the 1970s and 80s. Some of the shorts have been selected at previous years’ Festivals, but many others are new and will be seen here for the first time this year.
In addition to these programmes, La Fémis is organizing three “film lessons” at Clermont Communauté’s École supérieure d’art, from Monday to Wednesday during the Festival, focusing on screenwriting and television series, production and editing. These courses will be led by the respective department heads and will of course be open to all.
La Fémis (the national school of professions relating to image and sound) is one of the most prestigious public institutions dedicated to film.
Admission to the school is by competitive exam, and the fifty or so successful candidates choose among ten disciplines of film: screenwriting, producing, directing, cinematography, sound production, editing, continuity, production design, distribution and cinema management. Moreover, two new programs were introduced at the start of the 2013 school year: “TV Series Development” and an “art and design” PhD (as part of Research University Paris (PSL)’s SACRe doctoral programme).
One of La Fémis’s unique features is that it has no permanent teaching staff, and instead invites over five hundred working professionals to ensure each year’s artistic and technical training.
