How to film mum and dad without sinking into an interpersonal relationship bordering on blindness? This is the question that the Contrechamps documentary festival asked itself by devoting its 7e family edition. Reading the program immediately aroused our interest… The idea of following the daily life of a filmmaker-butcher, the escape of a father and the separation of a couple after 62 years of living together prompted us to reach the hills of the Aude.
The event was held from July 15 to 17, as a preamble to the well-known Summer Book Banquet, in the Sainte-Marie de Lagrasse abbey (Aude), a medieval village nestled in the Corbières massif. Supported by a new public establishment for cultural cooperation which is a serious candidate for the Cultural Meeting Center label, the event continues to expand: the program imagined by the documentary filmmaker Yves Jeuland (people of the world on the political service of the newspaper in 2014, Montand is ours, in 2021) now offers ten documentaries accompanied by around twenty guests brought together by family. Here, we say the Soualem, the Batteault, the Flatau, etc.
Most of them are first films, reminding us that an artist’s gaze is often born thanks to what is at hand. In this case, the ” old “ (parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents) are the foolproof muses, unlike the offspring who tyrannize the videos of a bunch of Instagrammers. Beyond the desire to preserve a trace of the ancients, there is, projected on the walls of the abbey, something of an urgency to repopulate the unspoken and to summon the figures of absence linked to the immigration, wars and disease.
Here are some plots: a son helps his mother find the family who hid her when she was saved from the Warsaw ghetto (The form, by Filip Flatau). A war photographer films his 98-year-old uncle Roger and his two sisters on their mission to repatriate the remains of their beloved brother Albert, who died in 1944 and is buried in a military cemetery in Oran, Algeria (We must bring Albert back, by Michael Zumstein). A young man retains in obstinate static shots the last gym sessions of his grandfather, victim of several strokes (Jean and Jeanineby Tom Orliaguet).
Rich programming
A show in itself, the screenings take place in the secular part of the abbey. At night, the sound crosses the course of the Orbieu, beats against the houses of the village and returns as an echo. During the day, between two film-debates, we cool off in the river from where we see gentlemen in white cassocks and straw hats, accompanied by preppy couples. The Canons Regular of the Mother of God and their disciples occupy the most recent part of the monastery. “Over there, it’s East Jerusalem… Masses in Latin, evangelization…”rolls his eyes a local, regretting to see “traditionalist Catholics” disembark in his “red noon”. The cellar where the afternoon screenings take place still bears the marks of what is called here “attack”. In the summer of 2007, after an edition of the Banquet du livre devoted to “The Sexual Night”, in reference to a novel by Pascal Quignard (Flammarion, 2007), the walls were sprayed with fuel oil. Locals would have seen three young people in scout outfits escaping in the night. Since then, everyone has been on their guard. The theme of this edition should not be a problem.
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