Four of our favorites in the Francophonie Panorama creation category

An aspirant Brazilian jockey, a complex portrait around the cut, an exchange of letters between the claimants and the General Commission for Jewish Affairs, a revolution in the “small corner”… Our nuggets cannot be missed.

For the 2023 vintage, held in Biarritz from January 20 to 28, Fipadoc offers the opportunity to discover nearly two hundred works, real stories that move and inspire us, and to meet the directors. In solidarity, it hosts Ukrainian films this year. The Francophonie Panorama creation category includes eleven documentaries already broadcast on television, cinemas or platforms during the year. We have selected four of them to explore as a priority.

“Vai Cavalo”, by Harold Grenouilleau and Vincent Rimbaux

We find Dirlinho in a brief tracking shot sitting on a galloping horse. From a slightly lower angle, we only see a handsome 12-year-old boy, his horse, and a cloudless sky. The feeling of freedom is complete. And completely transient, the decor is so vaporous when it appears. Because the horizon is closed in this corner of northeastern Brazil with the false air of the dusty Far West. To escape this quagmire, Dirlinho dreams of becoming a professional jockey and owning his own horses. Meanwhile, his only run is the Prado races, where animals are doped and safety standards are non-existent.

All this we understand in small touches in this wonderful impressionist documentary. The breathtaking speed of the horses is matched by slow narration and careful production. We see the teenager capturing an armadillo for food, flirting with girls, and talking to his cousin Edivan. “Get out of this dump”. And we guess the emptiness of their lives in these little nothings. Just as we see the violence in Brazil when Jair Bolsonaro confronts this desolate family gathered in front of his television. “We must stop being a country of pedals.” “If I think about everything that hurts me, I want to cry” Edivan admits in a rare moment of complaint. He is satisfied with riding a doped horse and dreams elsewhere. – TR
► Monday the 23rd, 8:30 p.m., at the Coliseum.
► Thursday the 26th at 1:00 PM in Bellevue Auditorium.

“To our excised organs”, By Anne Richard

In the foreground, Halimata applies Fofana. In the youth legal defense office, he reframes unyielding, straight-eyed youth. Then she runs off into the night humming Celine Dion, before we find her brooding in the middle of a baobab forest. Halimata Fofana is all that. All this, and this deep wound he doesn’t want to keep a secret: “I want to speak loud and clear about FGM with my loved ones. With you, mom. » So, the immigrant from Senegal enters into an intimate conversation with his mother, we will only hear his voice recordings.

title, To our excised bodies, is misleading. This film is not only a plea, and above all, it is a singularity that unites. And if the drama of Halimata Fofana’s mutilated body misleads this story on the wire, it engages in the realization of a complex portrait. “When I slap, I have to be strong to be able to uppercut” He entrusts Halimata to his childhood friend Emma. Claimed to be a self-portrait – since Halimata Fofana co-wrote this documentary with director Anne Richard – she takes on the character’s rawness in a constant search for balance. And it ends with the moving words of Halimat’s mother, who knows how to hear her daughter: “Myself, today I will not do it again. I say no to my grandchildren. » -JW
► Sunday 22, 6:00 p.m., Coliseum.
► Tuesday, the 24th at 3:45 p.m., at the Coliseum.

“Requests”, By Jérôme Prieur

Politeness prevails in the correspondence between the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs and the thousands of applicants who applied to the office from the spring of 1941 and were deprived of their jobs because of their Jewishness. and the other where the authorities took him. The impossibility of imagining Marshall attacking good patriots is mixed in some letters with anti-Semitic expression only against stateless persons or the recently acquired French whom we are prepared to admit are a danger to France.

Delving into these thousands of polite but irrevocable questions and answers with historian Laurent Joly, documentary filmmaker Jerome Prieur reveals the nastiness of Vichy’s anti-Jewish policy as well as the ideological context in which it took place. And we welcome more vividly emotional letters like Gaston Levy’s, which satirizes the hypocrisy of Pétain’s speech with bitter irony. The Pleas it is excellent at expressing the life of these yellowed pages covered with words of reverence, distress, but also the hope of benefiting from the exception of administrative logic. They touch upon the heart, recalling the persecution of individuals, many of whom did not suspect that their Jewishness could hinder the national recovery of a France on its knees before the occupier. – FE
► Monday the 23rd at 11:15 a.m. in Bellevue Auditorium.
► Thursday, the 26th at 6:45 p.m., in Bellevue Auditorium.

“The Great Battle of the Toilets” by Arnaud Robert

“We have a pandemic, climate change, protect sanitary conditions from me! » A business woman’s heartfelt cry sums up the general feeling about the removal and treatment of human excrement. The subject, of course, is not glamorous, but it is very important, this documentary learns what it takes to talk, and it is also instructive. According to the WHO, more than half of the world’s population does not have access to a proper toilet. Diseases associated with lack of hygiene (dysentery, diarrhea, etc.) cause the death of at least three hundred thousand children a year. The future of humanity is passing through a “small corner” revolution: Bill Gates understood this by organizing a large competition to “reinvent the toilet” through his Foundation.. Characteristics: no water to meet the needs of developing countries, little electricity and no connection to the sewage network.

If Arnaud Robert knows how to have fun with the billionaire’s high-tech inventions and a few jokes, he never loses the thread of his impeccable show that combines historical, health, economic and social approaches. He travels from India, where a government program to build dry toilets promises to end open defecation, to Switzerland, where a research center is working to recycle urine, while also pointing to the breakdown of our drainage systems that consume drinking water. We’ll go so far as to say it as an expert “shit can be fashionable” ? Maybe not. But an interesting topic, for sure. – IP
► Saturday 21st at 1:30pm in Bellevue Auditorium.
► Wednesday the 25th, 11:45 a.m., at the Coliseum.