Film director Raba Ameur-Zaimeche activates the Entrevues de Belfort festival

We are happy to return to Belfort, where the Entrevues film festival, created in 1986 by Janine Bazin, is rooted in the history of cinephilia, for which no one here, from the municipality to the community, including hundreds of high school students. No one seems to doubt the cinema option.

From November 20 to 27, the event will inaugurate this year – like FIDMarseille, which took place in June without appointing a successor to his mentor, Jean-Pierre Remy – an edition without a general delegate, whose opportunity was taken after his departure. Elsa Charbit for other horizons. An unsettling coincidence that suggests that festival self-management is growing, at risk, with everyone’s respect, running around like a headless chicken.

Ana Tarasashvili, head of out-of-competition programming and general secretary of the event Elsa Lanson, responds on behalf of the former team. Two young women are the mainstays of Entrevues, and their words are expressed with one voice, so to speak: “Elsa Charbit announced her departure late. We asked ourselves the question of recruitment, but the machine was already running. Instead of rushing, we preferred to go with it and rely on a team that was in any case very experienced. » What follows is less clear, but without dogmatism. Collegiality is a temptation, but the need for the incarnation of the festival does not diminish. The results of the 2022 edition will be decisive in this regard.

Poetic and political dynamite

Meanwhile, this year’s flagship event was undoubtedly the honoring of Raba Ameur-Zaimeche with her presence, as a bonus with the full body of her work and, on the cake, the presentation of her new film, Temple tree gang. Already a huge title, The Way of Shaolin ’93, for a film that doesn’t exactly live up to that promise.

There is nothing surprising about Ameur-Zaime, a director in every respect inaccessible, poetic and political destroyer and, for this very reason, one of our most treasured filmmakers. Born in Algeria in 1966, he landed in the town of Bousquet, Montfermeil (Saint-Saint-Denis), at the age of 2, he started in 2001. wow what’s going onCity movie that is Athena (Romain Gavras) What is Rimbaud to Vauban.

some masterpieces (blade number one in 2006, the last makeup 2008) and historical detours on marginal and cursed figures (Mandarin Songs, in 2011, the story of Judas 2015) later, the program today, to use its expression, “Returned to Modern”. Or the news that happened in 2014, in which a heavily armed gang from Seine-Saint-Denis was stopped on the ramp of the A1 motorway, at the height of the gate of La Chapelle, before being robbed of art guns. A black van carrying cash belonging to His Highness Abdel Aziz bin Fahd of Saudi Arabia.