02/11/2021 - The 62nd edition of the international documentary film festival, unspooling in Florence between 20 and 28 November, is set to dedicate an exclusive retrospective to the two French directors

Their works have never before been distributed in Italy, but the Festival dei Popoli is set to put this right. The 62nd edition of the international documentary film festival, which is unspooling in Florence between 20 and 28 November, will host the first Italian retrospective dedicated to Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval, a pair of French directors who are active in both documentary film and fiction, and whose works combine political resistance and poetic evocation.

Perpetual states of war in times of peace, the experience of social, political and economic violence, and themes of hospitality and racial integration are at the heart of the work produced by the two directors, who will travel to the Tuscan capital to present their films, to meet with their public and to take part in round tables and workshops. The tribute, entitled “Frontiers in Flames” and curated by Daniela Persico, will offer up a selection of 15 works, starting with the Italian premiere of Let’s Say Revolution (2021), before moving on to the first national screenings of Pariah (2000) and The Wound [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2004), the showcasing of hugely successful films such as Heartbeat Detector [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2007, starring Mathieu Amalric) and Low Life (2011), and covering projects of a more experimental nature such as the medium-length work Mata Atlantica (2016) and Four White Nights (2021), as well as those which intersect with theatre in the form of the trilogy Project Castellucci (2015), which was made in collaboration with Murmuris, and Hamlet in Palestine [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2017).

“I’m very proud to be bringing the works of two radical and socially committed filmmakers to the Festival dei Popoli and to Italy for the very first time”, the festival’s artistic director Alessandro Stellino enthused. “They’re not simply documentary makers, they’re directors who examine reality and the way we exist within the world as political and social bodies, via an extraordinary variety of forms, ranging from documentary to fiction, by way of installation art and filmed theatre, and this fits perfectly with the new direction we’re taking the festival in”.

“The question of boundaries is essential for us”, Klotz and Perceval explain in a note, “between formats, genres, budgets but also films which have already been made and those which are underway. Our current filmography, which is composed of fifty or so films, is neither finished nor fixed: it’s been a work in progress for three decades, a map of our exploratory attempts to film the present while coming to terms with the history that has gone before us and that which we are leaving to future generations. Ours is a ‘post-documentarian’ form of film, whose mission is to make visible that which politics, bureaucratic administrations and the police force are trying to rub out”.

The full line-up of the 62nd Festival dei Popoli, which will include an International Competition, an Italian Competition, Special Screenings and much, much more, will be announced on 10 November. The festival is organised with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Film Department, alongside the Tuscany Region, the City of Florence, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, and the Fondazione Sistema Toscana. 

(Translated from Italian)