As the saying goes, only mountains don’t meet. Still one could add that certain men have nothing to envy to the mountains, comparable by the height of their views or their creation to solitary peaks. This is what we see in See you Friday, Robinsonthe new documentary by Mitra Farahani, which tries, a little madly, to arrange the meeting between these two abrupt peaks that are the Franco-Swiss Jean-Luc Godard, and the Iranian Ebrahim Golestan, filmmaker, poet, essayist, immense figure of Persian culture.
Discovered at the Berlinale in February, the film is this week in Marseille, triple programmed (Thursday July 7, at 3.30 p.m.; Friday July 8, at 6.30 p.m., Saturday July 9, at 2 p.m.) at the International Documentary Festival (FID, from July 5 to 11). One stage among others in the discreet life of this funny and serious work, which will be visible on September 14 in theaters, then broadcast on the Franco-German channel Arte on October 10.
Missing picture
A word, beforehand, on the author, so singular in her subject. Born in 1975 in Tehran, Parisian by adoption for twenty years, she is in turn painter, filmmaker, producer. Slow tempo. Her first documentary is dedicated to a trans woman from Tehran (just a woman, 2001); his second focuses on the sexuality of an Iranian population bound by theocracy (Taboos, 2004) ; we find it again, in 2013, with Fifi screams with joy, devoted to the Iranian painter exiled in Rome, Bahman Mohassess, a magnificent imprecator forgotten by his contemporaries, who did him the tragic honor of leaving the world while the director was filming his paintings in the next room, the camera recording his final cry of anger. Few filmmakers can capture death live in this way, an essentially unforeseen, unique moment.
So, just as death, imprinted on the soundtrack alone, is the missing image of Fifi screams with joy, the meeting between Godard and Golestan will remain the missing image ofSee you Friday, Robinson. It is however the idea of a kind of historical repair that will have pushed Mitra Farahani to embark on this project: “In the 1960s, Godard and Golestan similarly upset the language of cinema. They had never met, I wanted to force fate. » The two men acquiesce, so powerful is Mitra Farahani’s power of persuasion. The idea of a digital correspondence is suggested by Godard, each having to take turns writing to the other on Friday before midnight. The case lasts eight months and includes around thirty exchanges.
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