Simple Gestures | FIDMarseille 2025
FIDMarseille is a bazaar of unsorted images, free of trademarks or auteurist vanities, waiting to be (re)claimed by a gaze. Some are poorer, others weathered by time, others more vibrant and exuberant: by stripping away the hierarchies that usually govern international festivals, FIDMarseille lays out a risky, unmarked path, where money and prestige give way to things fundamental to cinema.
Marseille is a city that still resists. No casinos, but improvised souks; no Michelin-starred restaurants, but kebab joints on every corner, popular bars (one of the coolest is called “Le Bar du Peuple”), and cosmopolitan beaches where people mingle freely. At night, downtown, locals play football in intersections or grill merguez sausages. Thus, it’s easy to romanticise it. Friendly and unpretentious, the city is in the throes of gentrification (radical-chic spots with bio-vegan menus are popping up everywhere) and grappling with a growing influx of Parisians lured by the mild climate and the feeling that in Marseille, the future remains to be invented. From the steps of the train station – a kind of “empire” version of the Odessa stairs – the city stretches out foamy and smoking to the horizon, like a living, utopian settlement.
In many ways, FIDMarseille tries to mirror that spirit. The audiences are numerous, a mix of locals and more and more people arriving from far away for a few days, drawn by a selection that, with a few exceptions, steers clear of big names and safe bets. The films are wildly diverse: from a few minutes long sketches to sprawling epics, from avant-garde restorations to essays based on current events, brought from all over the world (South America, in particular, was well represented) and screened in very different partner cinemas (from a three-story cityplex to a small, politically chic venue). The people who come here, on both sides of the screen, know they’re not at Cannes, but rather at its rigorous opposite: no stars (and therefore, no police), but plenty of filmmakers and viewers interested in cinema as art, idea, and thought process. The festival is a fairground of long conversations stretching into the night, on the sidewalk outside the theatre or in some obscure spot accessible only to the initiated. Most of the films shown at FID are world premieres, and over their images hovers the sense that, realistically, they wouldn’t have found a home anywhere else: they’re too weird, too fragile, too unsellable. FID is a great equaliser, a hopeful forum.
Filmmaker Nine Antico said before the premiere of her short Le Fond vert: “We made the film on a shoestring budget, without authorisations and all those things that kill love.” I was expecting a freewheeling film, but discovered a flabby paste of indifferent images (ironically, supported by the French CNC). It’s just one example, but a telling one. It must be said that FID walks a fine line. Anti-industry rhetoric can easily become empty talk – a slogan. Dependent on contemporary film production, which is often disappointing – if not outrageously bad – the festival delivers year after year an accurate picture of the artistic periphery, a sprightly and chaotic area whose minimum moral is that fighting the imperatives of the industry is more and more a necessary but not sufficient condition. Caught up in buzzwords that instantly attract collegial sympathy, this kind of cinema is often reduced to recycling and pastiche, with “risk” turned into obligation (show me a filmmaker who doesn’t “take risks”) and the “political take” reduced to a conformist ingredient.
Le Fond vert was followed by Où sont nos feux d’artifices?, a short shot in Marseille during the 2024 edition of FID, by a collective called “Film Flamme” (a play on words referencing the old name for flammable nitrate stock and the punkish energy of its makers). The film opens with some boys “from the neighbourhood” goofing around for the camera, who hang out near a kebab shop, revving up their scooters or miming karate kicks. Gradually, a narrative thread emerges: it’s a few days before Bastille Day, and the boys are gearing up for a blowout. The second act opens in darkness, on the night of July 14. The same boys are setting off firecrackers and small fireworks in the street, in a pyrotechnic-Dionysian neighbourhood vibe buzzing with energy. At one point, the cameraman asks some kids – of Maghrebi descent – if they know the significance of the day: in their hesitant, bashful, but funny and carefree answers, the film takes on a remarkable historical dimension, collapsing the secular image of the Bastille’s fall into this postcolonial present like a pure dopamine hit, fully resistant to any kind of ossified ceremony. Musical and immersive, the film carries a festive energy, constructed like a communal celebration where everyone brings what they have. A genuine act of self-representation (if we must be pedantic), it’s the product of a workshop embedded in the community and, although it starts as a joke (who hasn’t filmed their buddies as if they were big stars?), by the end it feels like a pedagogical gesture, concerned with how a national ethos is passed down and evolves over time. The effort behind Film Flamme is not just an opportunistic mimicry of the working-class condition; it’s grassroots cinema, meant to dissolve the distance between “us” and “them,” with the camera as a playful device, a tool for self-knowledge, a political instrument.
Such simple gestures proved fruitful throughout the festival. In the French competition, the winning film by Pauline Bastard, Bonne journée, runs for around 50 minutes and shows, in mostly dialogue-free scenes, workers from an Emmaüs centre in Grenoble as they restore and display various objects donated by citizens – from a comical variety of chairs (plastic stools, dining chairs, armchairs) to clothing items. The process is reflective: Bastard films the employees – mostly people of colour – during photo sessions that capture them surrounded by these objects, democratically piled up, removed from their former lives, about which we can only speculate. This gives them a kind of aura: they appear as melancholic, silent kings and queens ruling over a prop kingdom haunted by ghosts.
The travelogue is a genre that lends itself to these patched-together, precariously assembled aesthetics. One such film triumphed in the international competition: Fuck the Polis by Portuguese filmmaker Rita Azevedo Gomes, who set off through Greece with a small group of friends to film photogenic places and personal nostalgias. A film with no real centre of gravity, Fuck the Polis strings together picturesque shots of seaside towns, readings from Cavafy or Keats, and an encounter with the famous singer Maria Farantouri. The result is inconclusive, far from the peaks of the filmmaker’s career (A Portuguesa, 2018; A Vingança de uma Mulher, 2012), a loose montage of “poetic” images with little inspiration, hoping they will ignite a spark. But the spark never comes: the film remains cold and unbearably bland. As one fellow critic joked, its only real purpose seems to be the reimbursement of this Greek vacation. When it comes to archipelago travelogues, we’ll continue to refer to Jean-Daniel Pollet’s excellent Trois jours en Grèce (1991).
A kind of travelogue as well, No Title by master Lebanese director Ghassan Salhab was presented in the parallel section “Autres joyaux” – but this one is steeped in pain and devastation. In this short, 40-minute film, composed largely of tracking shots captured from a car, the filmmaker charts a route from Beirut’s suburbs to Lebanon’s rural south, marked by destruction and rubble. Salhab’s gesture is concrete, dry: he shows us a reality, a process of mourning. No Title – a nod to the recent protest album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor against the Gaza massacre – is truly a window. A processual film, it reveals a mortified country in motion. It could have been titled “The Way South,” like Johan van der Keuken’s film, but here, any cinephilic reference would feel frivolous, like a defection from the modest mission of reportage. There are no gratuitous frills here: between the film’s two movements, Salhab includes a few night shots in which animal sounds are replaced by the buzz of drones, under moonlight. A minimal editing operation that neither embellishes nor deceives – it arises from simple observation. A chronicler of Lebanon and the Middle East for the past three decades, Salhab continues a vital labour, a fidelity to place coupled with sharp political insight.
Mourning is also the theme of Ignacio Agüero’s aptly titled Cartas a mis padres muertos (Letters to My Dead Parents). A classically styled essay film, Agüero’s feature weaves together his father’s biography with the national history of Chile, which in the 1970s shifted abruptly from social utopia to the grip of a brutal dictatorship. Agüero’s father died shortly after Allende’s rise to power – he didn’t live to witness the ensuing coup or the horrors under Pinochet, let alone the recent popular protests that were, in turn, documented by Patricio Guzmán in My Imaginary Country (2022). Agüero isn’t quite Guzmán – he lacks his capacity for extrapolation and visionary scope – but he does sketch out a powerful historical constellation, drawing on footage from his early films, testimonies from workers of the era, and the flowers now blooming in the garden outside his house. It’s a film where things come together; it stays raw and somewhat unexpected in its compositional choices: a long interview with a friend of his father’s, for instance, pierces the previously poetic fabric, anchoring the film in lived history.
Finally, Vetre, pricaj sa mnom (Wind, Talk to Me) by Stefan Đorđević presents the director – also the film’s protagonist – returning to the family home after the death of his mother. Awaiting him there are his grandparents, brother, a dog he adopted after accidentally hitting it with his car, and a film project he’s struggling to complete. The film portrays this trial by fire, i.e. coming to terms with the loss of a loved one, but does so through a serene and (perhaps overly) calm mise-en-scène, emphasising the gentle humour and inevitable awkwardness of grief, along with the search for peace and harmony. Although carefully constructed, Đorđević lends the film a nearly documentary-like indeterminacy. I refuse to read details about it, because I feel they would clarify this uncertain area that makes the film a fortunate outcome of a complex process of fictionalising real events, blended with improvised scenes and the embrace of accidents and the unexpected.
In its decision to reflect major current events – such as the war crimes in Ukraine and Gaza – FIDMarseille has established itself as one of the most politically outspoken and committed film festivals, willing to profoundly alter its selection in the name of thunderous solidarity with oppressed peoples. Yet Vetre, pricaj sa mnom comes from a wholly different realm: that of discreet intimacy and individual tragedies at the edge of the unspeakable. It’s a sign that, far from succumbing to dogma, the selection pursued a radical line of cinema that transforms and sharpens the world around it – both at the macro and micro levels. The festival doesn’t stand at the margins of society, but rather at its feverish core, renegotiating itself from film to film.
When I arrived at the festival, the surroundings of Marseille were burning due to the drought and the Mistral wind. The opening – which is usually held in an open-air amphitheatre, and this year featured Kontinental 25 by Radu Jude, honoured with an extensive retrospective – was moved indoors. The geography of the region, with its spectacular heights, sun-scorched cypress-lined paths, and the sea in which Edmond Dantès, the wronged and vengeful hero of The Count of Monte Cristo, is said to have swum to survive, is at once a laboratory of forms, a challenge for filmmakers, and a wake-up call. From the very first day, FID was placed – by Mother Nature herself, so to speak – under the sign of urgency. In their disenchanted relationship with the costly circuits of the industry, nearly all the films shown here tried to live up to that ideal.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
