Delphine Seyrig

This visual essay, produced in 2023, builds upon rare radio interviews that Chantal Akerman gave in 1975 and 1977, in which she reflects on her films and her ascendance to critical success.

We thought we'd seen, read, and heard everything there was to see about the Cannes Film Festival, from the glitz and gossip to the scandals and censorship. And yet, Emmanuel Barnault's "Morceaux de Cannes" (Pieces of Cannes), by this leading expert on Italian and French cinema, convinces us otherwise. The third largest event in the world (after the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) reveals its secrets only sparingly, as this film attests. The result of passionate research in the INA archives, these 52 minutes, without interviews or voice-over narration, string together rare and sometimes previously unseen footage. Taken together, they tell a surprising, original, and heartwarming story of the Festival. On the beach, on a street corner, in a restaurant, or in the privacy of a hotel room, these forgotten archives summon the greatest filmmakers, actors, and actresses of the last seventy years, from Jean Cocteau to David Lynch, for an anthology of the Festival's history.

If Jean Rochefort remains so dear to our hearts, it is because this extraordinary actor alone embodies a cinema and a France imbued with freedom and carelessness. Through his films, archives and the testimony of those close to him, we discover a complex man, a sad clown saved by his taste for words and for fun.

In the 70s, actress Delphine Seyrig and director Carole Roussopoulos, both militant feminists, were the pioneers of video activism in France. They documented the demonstrations of French feminists and used the new technologies to counter the poor representation of women in the public media.

Delphine Seyrig decided to work on a film project about Calamity Jane to reveal Jane’s sensibility and insight about life in those letters to her daughter. The reading of those letters permits a self-reflection about feminism and motherhood.

Underscored by French film legend Delphine Seyrig’s evocative recitation of a Henri Michaux poem, Maureen Fazendeiro’s film is a mysterious, multi-textured portrait of eclipse spectators in Portugal.

My aim is to create a highly compressed museum of cinema, consisting of some of the most notoriously engaging, difficult, and lengthy works of film history—those nearly invisible works that explore the limit conditions of film. Works that have become invisible precisely because of their status as “classics.” The experiment is to see just what comes to light when these works are compressed into a familiar yet brief span of time, where one might hold the whole film in memory at once, or refresh one’s memory in a Proustian rush of images, or simply experience that energy of delusion.

Documentary on famous writer Marguerite Duras and her paradoxical relation to the seventh art by her former film editor.

A film where anything can happen - the hero and the heroine changes their faces, age, look, names, and so on. The only same thing: The love between man and woman... in an archetypical love story cut from 500 classics from all around the world.

Found footage using Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.