Blowing on a dandelion: the poster for ACID, a Cannes parallel section which is also “blowing out” its thirty candles in 2022, gives the measure of all the hopes borne by cinema. Perspectives of freedom, new aesthetics, lighting of an ever more fragile and threatened world. Before unveiling the selection, which will be visible in Cannes from May 17 to 28, let’s remember that the films of ACID – Association of Independent Cinema for its Distribution – are chosen by a team of filmmakers – who act as “sponsors” and “godmothers” – and do not necessarily have a distributor when they are shown on the Croisette. Failing to guarantee miracles, as the apprentice healer does in Jacky Pebbleby Lucas Delangle, one of the selected works, the nine films of the 2022 vintage (including six first feature films) examine the news in the most diverse formats.
Here is the filmed diary, How to Save a Dead Friend, in which Russian director Marusya Syroechkovskaya recounts a deeply depressed and defiant youth. And behold, in fiction Yamabukithe awakening of collective action, in a village in Japan, captured by the filmmaker Juichiro Yamasaki – the story of a young girl, follower of silent protest, who will cross paths with other inhabitants.
Gesture and movement will be at the center of other devices. In Magdala, the French Damien Manivel, filmmaker of the tiny and the poetic, revisits the figure of Mary Magdalene, disciple of Jesus who accompanied him until his last days. The character is here embodied by the choreographer Elsa Wolliaston, the very one who illuminated the previous “long” by Manivel, The Children of Isadora (2019), as well as his “short” The lady with the dog (2010). We dance, too, in this Atlantic Bar, documentary by Fanny Molins, until the closure of the place marks the end of a world.
Big spaces
So we have to leave, several films tell us, shot in the great outdoors. In Polaris, documentary and potential boat movie, Spanish director Ainara Vera went to film a boat captain in the Arctic, who is “connected” to her sister who has just given birth – but also to the immense sky. In The hill, Denis Gheerbrant and Lina Tsrimova transport us to Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia, where the air is not necessarily more breathable. Closer to us, in Greater Parisby Martin Jauvat (extended version of the short film Grand Paris Express, selected at the Clermont-Ferrand festival), two somewhat idle, funny and quirky young people wander around and discover a mysterious object in the suburbs of Paris. Better than the money expected from their crappy little scheme, the strange thing transforms the day of the two friends. No need to move anymore, the strange object glues them to their dreams.
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