Autumn is rich in quality festivals. The competition is all the tougher, and it is not uncommon to find titles that ring out from one competition to another. To shine, you have to find, at a time when category A festivals concentrate the best of world production, a way to stand out and defend your flowerbeds. The very nature of the Entrevues de Belfort festival, focused on young creation – it does not select beyond the third film – gives it a marked identity.
This is no longer enough, however, the first films being so well coveted by everyone. Arrival in 2019 following Lili Hinstin, appointed in Locarno, Elsa Charbit, new general delegate of the festival, after a first transitional edition and a second floating in the digital space due to the pandemic, can hope this year to print her style. It is clear, in this regard, that Entrevues – the thirty-sixth edition was held from November 21 to 28 – is pushing the fires of reality. First of all through the presence of documentaries, but even more as a power working within fiction. This movement, symmetrical to that of the FID in Marseille which, under the impetus of Jean-Pierre Rehm, started from the documentary to dredge the waters of fiction, today brings together in spirit these two events turned towards hybridization, the research, risk-taking, among the most exciting in the French festival landscape.
Thus, of the nine feature films in the competition, two were pure documentaries, and most films bore witness to a strong imprint of reality, to the point sometimes that their fictional nature was not clearly identifiable. This is the case of two Portuguese-speaking films, one Portuguese, the other Brazilian, whose conduct we appreciated. borderline and the narrative nonchalance that changes from the scriptwriting loop that has become the force of law in the production. No cab for Jack, by Susana Nobre, thus offers a “Reenactment” (“Re-staging”) of the life of Joaquim (Armindo Martins Rato), 63, ex-taxi in New York currently looking for certified documents to benefit from his unemployment benefits, and whose past scrolls according to his laborious research.
Irresistible jubilation
Black leather jacket, severely shiny hair, yellow shirt, signet ring as big as your hand, this vague double of Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt), Tony Soprano’s second, quickly wins you over to his cause. Between Vila Franca de Xira, his small town of residence, and La Pomme, where he landed in 1972 with three 300 dollars in his pocket loaned by the shoe merchant Mr. Ferreira, it is the story of an accession to prosperity not very convincing which takes shape, but which reveals itself rich, on the other hand, of this fabric of hopes and dreams which lines our short lives. “ In Portugal, at this time, specifies Joaquim while remaining on the pedestrian register – you would be buried in the shoes you wore at your wedding. “ At least Joachim will start with his feet in front when he remembers that he drove Muhammad Ali and Jackie Kennedy in his limo.
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