26 thematic paths to find movies related to your projects

Rediscovering films that once got censored and now bear witness to this specific political and cultural context. Sometimes, also, a film has disappeared because it got censored. Referencing it in this database can also be a way to help it come back to life.

When cinema met History being made, it gave birth to films which have now become testimonials. These films sometimes allow us to look back at the commitments of the time and to question them. Today, films continue to be made and they sometimes provide premonitory testimony to the questions that run through our society.

Thinking about the relationship between society and cinema, one can outline a history of the 7th art, which will necessarily be subjective, but which can also suggest paths to follow for all those who wish to enter into this world which, perhaps, is new to them.

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 show it again.

Hannah Arendt wished that one day they would all become « guests of the world »: there would be no deported people anymore, no illegal migrants, individuals would no more be harrassed for their opinions, for their « deviant » sexuality or their religion…

Running against dominant thinking within their own camp, some of us are taking the risk of reaching out to meet the other.

Let’s make of these words a shared reality, at a time when political action seems more than ever cut off from the general interest and public good. Other systems of governance and citizenship, other relationships to politics are being invented at the margins of the classical system of representation. Cinema bears witness to this movement.

Observing how cinema captures Europe’s reality. How it invents a common culture of Europe.

Retracing the filmed memory of Corrèze and its region, paying attention today to what is being invented thanks to cinema in our area…

After the COP 21, let’s open our eyes to a world that is yet to be preserved : ours.

« Phármakon », an ancient greek word that gave birth to « pharmacie » in French, got brought up to date by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler : it refers to the Internet that is both the disease and the cure, as well as the scapegoat the new technologies have become.

The singer Colette Magny used to say « Are you aware that without you, there’s nothing we can do ». This quote shows the power of collective action. Everyday, unions or organizations, whether through social networks or in more informal ways, create a resistance to the deterioration of their working conditions. Alternatives are being invented and films have not given up, still documenting and showing that another world is possible.

It is an old word, developed before the Enlightenment, which gives a fine definition of what economy could be : the management of our common house. Cooperatives, mutuals, solidarity economics offer each in its own way a management of « our common house » at the service of the people, looking for alternatives to capitalism.

When the world becomes a gigantic market, when states get erased by the dictates of large financial groups, then emerges a state of emergency. This is it where we’re at…

Throughout history, work has changed. Between the 19th and 20th centuries, with the rise of the capitalist industry, the number of wage-earners, especially factory workers, has increased and a social class emerged through struggles and union actions. During the same period, the cinematograph was born, displaying sometimes complicities and connivances. Today labour and work conditions are changing a lot, and very quickly, as well as in contradictory ways. The question of work becomes central, including for those who do not have any, those who live in very precarious conditions. How can cinema help us understand work better ?

From Saint-Denis in the Parisian suburbs to the Satéré Mawé Indigenous peoples, via downtown Paris or Saint-Yrieux-le-Déjalat, a single world but a multiplicity of ways of inhabiting it.

How does cinema speak about the youth? How are the youth being heard throughout these films ?

How relevant that quote from Simone de Beauvoir still remains today ! A women’s cinema has always existed since the origins of the 7th art. It is useful to highlight it here, because if we don’t, nobody else will !

What has become of the public school and Jules Ferry’s project ? How, through culture, can we build a shared world ?

Over the past few years, filmmakers have entered prisons, questioned the justice system, observed the police, questionning how those places and institutions have been challenging our exercise of democracy.

Since its invention in 1895, the 7th Art has accompanied the most diverse range of artistic movements. Today, the birth of digital recording (like the introduction of video 40 years before that) is challenging the forms and ways the world is being represented through moving images.

Let’s pay attention to the collusion between media and the financial power, to journalists’ freedom of expression, to the way opinion is being forged, and let’s observe new citizenship practices that are developing through the Internet.

Let’s wrap it up with this theme, because cinema is maybe the greatest inventor of utopias… as it is of catastrophes !