26 thematic paths to find movies related to your projects

Better than any other art, cinema, by giving voice to individual human beings, restores and questions History. It itself becomes « historical material ».

Make of these words a shared reality, at a moment when political action seems ever more cut off from general interest and public welfare. Other systems of governance, citizenship and relationship to politics are being invented at the margins of the classical systems of representation. Some films testify to this movement.

Rediscovering movies censored at one time, become witnesses to a political and cultural context.

Cinema, at the precise moments when it has met history being made (under the Popular Front (1936) or in May 68) created films which have become testimonials. These films speak to us and remind us both of powerful moments within the collective memory and the aspiration to change the world. These documents also allow us sometimes to look at the commitments of the time and to question them. Today films are still being made which strongly testify, sometimes in premonitory ways, of the fundamental movements and questions which are shaping our societies.

Around the relation between society and cinema is proposed here a history of the 7th art, necessarily subjective, but which can suggest paths for further enquiry to all those who wish to enter this world which, perhaps, is new for them.

Sometimes some films become the manifesto of a generation or a new form of writing.

Immigration, displaced persons, the stateless… Hannah Arendt hoped that one day all would become « the world’s guests », i.e. that there would be no more deported people, illegal migrants, individuals harassed for their opinion, for their « deviance », sexuality, religion…

Running against dominant thinking within their own camp, some, very few, take the risk of reaching out to meet the other, such as micro projects that develop between Israelis and Palestinians…

Here we retrace the filmed memory of the Corrèze and its region, pay attention today to what cinema is being invented in our area…

Observe how cinema captured the reality of Europe.

After COP 21 , open the eyes to a world to preserve : ours.

How cinema speaks of youth? Is youth is heard throughout the movie ?

Talking about a film is one way of allowing it to exist and perhaps of inviting a distributor, a video publisher, a federation of ciné-clubs to re-screen it. Sometimes, also, a film can disappear because it has been censored. Recording it in the base is also a way to help it come back to life.

How pertinent remains that remark by Simone de Beauvoir. Alongside the huge number of films devoted to the feminine condition, a women’s cinema has always existed from the origins of the art. It is useful to mark its presence for it is a defining aspect of the art’s history and existence.

This fine line by the songstress Colette Magny denotes the power of collective action. In workshops, companies, the unions resist the deterioration of work conditions. Work councils, staff organisations invent alternatives in the world of labour.

What is more difficult than to film work, the memory of gestures? Through this act of cinema, film-makers have traced the lives of thousands of people whose existence is expressed in the daily routine of the workplace.

Throughout history the work has changed. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the rise of capitalist industry, wage-earners, especially worker, was developed and constituted by struggles and union action as a social class. During the same period the cinematograph was born, displaying sometimes complicities and connivances. Today labour and its conditions of exercises change a lot, quickly, and in contradictory ways. The question of labour becomes central, including those who do not have it, or those who live it very precariously. How cinema could help us to understand that ?

Be careful about collusion between media and financial power, the freedom of expression of journalists, and observe the new citizenship practices that develop through the internet.

An old word, developed before the Enlightenment and which gives a fine definition of Economics: the economy is the management of the common house. Cooperatives, mutuals, solidarity economics, open each in its own way to the construction of another world. They manage in this way « the common house » which is our world, looking for alternatives to capitalist economics.

From Saint Denis in the Paris suburbs to the Satéré Mawé Indians, via the centre of Paris or Saint-Yrieux le Déjalat, one unique world with multiple belongings, a multiplicity of ways of inhabiting the earth.

When the world becomes a gigantic market, when states are erased by the dictates of large financial groups, our world entered into a state of emergency : here we are…

What happen to public school and the Jules Ferry’s project ? How, through culture, build a shared world ?

The police, justice, prison, army, state… Over the past few years, film-makers have been welcomed into prisons, questioned the justice system, observed the police, probed the exercise of democracy.

From its invention in 1895, the 7th Art has accompanied the most diverse range of artistic movements. Today the development of digital recording, like the introduction of video 40 years ago, is upsetting the forms and ways by which the world is represented through images.

Let us close with this theme, for cinema is perhaps the greatest inventor of utopia, as it is of catastrophes…