For the second consecutive year of this new program merging into the officiai Festival of 3 Continents program, Continent J offers a unique opportunity to discover what is new in filmmaking and the different ways of helping our youngest audience discover it. This year it puts forward an eclectic six-film program mainly film premieres.
With the difference of the previous years, where the program screened films that had already been released in theaters, this year the Continent J comity backs up the right for young people to discover, as any other festival audience, exceptional film premieres. From the start the Festival of the 3 Continents has made a stand on discovery and has inspired its audience curiosity for new films.
For the Festival of 3 Continents’ 30th anniversary, the Continent J comity puts forward a heteroclite but also very homogeneous film panel, enlightening the outstanding identifies of the young people of today. It is meant to be both an ongoing evocation of the future, and an open call for a better understanding of our world. The common point between these films is the portraits of these young people and the world they live in, a large scope reaching out from their first steps into the world of adults, the vital need of self expression and living on their own. Always pushed around or stirred up by the social and political issues of their environment, these young boy’s and girl’s lives work as mirrors of our time. Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan: high places of our everyday breaking international news, territories where childhood is in grave danger.
Zimbabwe, With a Girl of Black Soil, The Grain, The Path and Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame place their young hero in core situations of resistance and reflection of the world. Through various cinematographic proposals, more or less formal but always strong, these young people personify a rude world, victims of their country context often forced way too soon into becoming adults. In addition to their strong issues they explore, these five films offer us astonishing acting performances full of hard truth. Behind the camera, two of these films are directed by women filmmakers, whose convictions and public statements bear witness of their political acts: Hana Makhmalbaf for Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame and Ishtar Yasin Gutierez for The Path.
To complete these five fiction films, the Afghan short-film program Enfants de Kaboul presents strong contemporary youth portraits. In a documentary vein which daims to work along the same Unes as Jean Rouch, the ateliers Varan coordinated the work of these five young Afghan filmmakers and this totally new program based on snapshots of Kabul, the country’s situation through Bulbul and the street children or the unforgettable Abdullah workman in a «volcanic» brickyard.
These images offer a unique testimony of today’s Afghanistan and a fascinating fresh glimpse on a very singular documentary style.
The Continent J comity continues to reach out towards the youngest audiences and this year invites them to discover six new horizons which will hopefully both widen our view on the world and give us the opportunity to share intense and intimate moments of cinema.
Guillaume Mainguet
Continent J coordination and programming
