The Belgian co-production Saints'Game won the National Centre for Visual Arts (CNAP) award at the 28th Marseille International Film Festival.
This year’s FIDMarseille was held from 11 to 17 July. The winners included the Belgo-French co-production Saints'Game, directed by Amélie Derlon Cordina, which received the CNAP award.
Synopsis
The film opens with a prologue. A young man, facing a blackboard, addresses the viewer and explains that a templum is the area around a sacred space in the ancient world. Next sequence: a domestic setting with a young woman whose movements evoke devotion. Director Amélie Derlon Cordina examines the interplay between sacred images, the saints in the title, here. By exploring her own past and that of four protagonists from different places (the action takes place in Belgium, the director is French, and the actors are from Dagestan, Iceland, and Palestine), the film portrays many places that convey and produce images and bodies, acting as conduits from one to the next. This circulates and links living spaces, a theatre stage, photographs, a conference room, a cinema green screen destined to hold images, etc., but the film itself is also a setting. And, beyond the religious iconography, the film examines the possibility of the play, in the sense of non-correspondence, between things that do not truly coincide, a study of loss as freedom. Can we be free of the images and gestures conveyed? The question remains unanswered, paradoxical, just like Daniil Harms’ cruel fable that runs through the film, of a being stripped of its body, or the need to be freed of its magic powers, as suggested by Prospero’s epilogue, borrowed from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
- Original version: English, French, Russian
- Subtitles: English, French
- Script: Amélie Derlon Cordina
- Image: Julien Englebert, Son Doan, Amélie Derlon Cordina
- Editing: Amélie Derlon Cordina
- Sound: Théophile Gay-Mazas, Adrien Monfleur, Edith Herregods
- Starring: Rimah Jabr, Timur Magomedgadzhiev, Oskar Petzet, Amélie Derlon
- The was made as part of the SoundImageCulture programme in Brussels, produced by Samuel Hauser Films Production, distributed by Argos vzw Centre for Art and Media in Brussels, with the support of the Brussels Audiovisual Centre (CBA) and the GSARA, with the help of the Atelier Jeunes Cinéastes (AJC) and Polymorfilms (Laurent Van Lancker).
Filmography
- Les suppliantes, 2013
- Mange tes morts, 2011
- Daily life, 2008
National Centre of Visual Arts award
This prize is awarded by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, an artist appointed by the CNAP, in consultation with the jury of the Compétition Française, to a Compétition Française and Compétition Premier film. The award money is provided by the CNAP.
FIDMarseille
In early July each year, the Marseille International Film Festival (FIDMarseille), chaired by Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens and directed by Jean-Pierre Rehm, offers a programme of 150 films to approximately 25,000 viewers in cinemas, theatres, libraries, art galleries, amphitheatres, and outdoor screenings in the city of Marseille. The festival includes a large number of world premières, première films, and has come to be seen as fertile ground for new cinematography, documentaries, and fiction. FIDMarseille also holds FIDLab, a support platform for international co-production, FIDCampus, a training workshop for Mediterranean students, and many outdoor screenings all year round.
Find out all the Wallonia-Brussels film news on the Wallonie-Bruxelles Images website.