AFC-related activities

Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, AFC, worked with Léa Mysius on Ava (Critics’ Week 2017, Best Cinematography award in Stokholm, 2017) and Marie Monge on Joueurs (Directors’ Fortnight 2018). He has regularly shot for documentarist Sébastien Lifshitz (Les Vies de Thérèse, Directors’ Fortnight 2016) and also Adolescentes and Sasha (to be released). He worked with Aude Léa Rapin on Heros Don’t Die, a film which mixes the genres of fiction and documentary, and which was selected in the 58^th Critics’ Week. (BB)

A graduate of the Ecole nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière with a major in Cinema, Sébastien Buchmann, AFC, has been working on both documentaries and fiction films ever since. He has worked a number of times with Dominique Marchais, who is a director of activist documentaries (La ligne de partage des eaux, Nul homme n’est une île). On the fiction side, he is the faithful associate of Valérie Donzelli, La guerre est déclarée, Mickhaël Hers, Amanda, and Nicolas Pariser, alongside whom he has just completed a new philosophic-political opus entitled Alice et le Maire (Alice and the Mayor), in selection at the Directors’ Fortnight.

Held up by the night shooting of Thom Yorke’s new music video, Darius Khondji, AFC, ASC, was only able to make a quick round-trip to Cannes this year. Too late, in any case, to be able to attend the screening at the Grand Théâtre Lumière of a part of the series "Too Old To Die Young", which he and Diego Garcia shot for Nicolas Winding Refn. He was, however, able to find some time to speak with us, by phone, about this shoot in Los Angeles… (FR)

Two films shot by Julien Poupard, AFC, have already won the Caméra d’or at Cannes: Party Girl, by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger and Samuel Theis in 2014, and Divines, by Houda Benyamina, in 2016. Last year, he was with Pierre Salvadori’s film En liberté! at the Directors’ Fortnight. This year, he’s back with a first film, Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables, in Official Competition at the 72^nd Cannes Film Festival. (BB)

Hélène Louvart, AFC, signed off on the image of La Vie invisible, a Brazilian film presented at Un Certain Regard 2019. A story of two sisters that takes place from the 1950s to the present time. She tells us about her working relationship with Karim Ainouz, the director, and about their shared ambition to dare to create striking visual universes, and about how they learned to modulate that ambition so as to avoid being above the story and the characters, visually speaking. (FR)

Cinematographer Claire Mathon, AFC, sat down for an interview with François Reumont to discuss her work on Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait d’une jeune fille en feu. Here, we offer you a transcript of her words.

Cinematographer Rémy Chevrin, AFC, sat down with François Reumont to discuss his work on Christophe Honoré’s film Room 212. Here, we offer you a transcript of their interview.

Pierre Trividic and Patrick Mario Bernard have been directing films together since the 1980s. Their filmography reveals a taste for the strange and the fantastic, such as Le Cas Lovecraft (documentary), Dancing, L’Autre. With L’Angle mort, they offer us a cinema that engages simultaneously with political and romantic issues. We met Jonathan Ricquebourg, AFC, last year, to discuss Jean-Bernard Marlin’s vigorous film Sheherezade. Since then, he has also signed off on the image of Jean-Charles Hue’s Tijuana Bible, and is currently working with the Trividic-Mario Bernard tandem on their latest film, L’Angle mort. This film is presented by the ACID at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Following Winter Brothers for which she earned the award for First feature film at Camerimage in 2017, the young Swedish cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff again joined forces with Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason on a drama that portrays a former police officer mourning the loss of his wife and who brings his young daughter along on an uncertain quest into the past. Alongside the impressive Ingvar Sigurðsson (for whom the film was written), the little girl (Hlynur Pálmason’s own daughter), and a visual landscape made up of gradients of fog and rain surrounding the coastal town of Höfn (which simply means “port” in Icelandic) in the south-western part of Iceland. (FR)

Cinematographer Claire Mathon, AFC, sat down with François Reumont to discuss her work on Mati Diop’s Atlantics. We are pleased to share with you a transcript of her words.

Reading the screenplay of Vif-argent (whose working title was La Nuit je mens), Céline Bozon remembers having particularly enjoyed the mix of genres between daily chronicle of Parisian life, romance story, and fantastic film. (FR)

To Bruno Nuytten and Caroline Champetier, AFC
Although it might seem an exaggeration, this little wink at Robert Doisneau is the opportunity to remind our readers that over a dozen members of the AFC – and I may not have had the opportunity of recognizing everyone in attendance – attended a nearly-full auditorium on Wednesday, 20 March at 8pm to support Bruno Nuytten at the opening of the retrospective that was dedicated to him at the Cinémathèque française.

The 19^th annual Micro Salon, held on 8 and 9 February 2019, made a decisive change, which had been in the works for the past two to three years, and moved to the Parc Floral de Paris. There, a massive open space awaited it, which allowed for easier set-up, a design that made visiting more pleasant for attendees, and large meeting spaces where conviviality, one of our event’s hallmarks, went hand-in-hand with equipment presentation and screenings of images, the creation of which is the principal subject of interest of all in attendance.

At the 44^th Annual 2019 César Awards ceremony, it was possible to moon Robert Redford or to have a César awarded to the box-office champion by one’s own father, but it was impossible to voice a number of important questions regarding French cinema without being interrupted by a little tune…

Director of photography Manu Dacosse, SBC, recently received the Magritte Award for Best Cinematography on the movie Laissez bronzer les cadavres (Let the Corpses Tan), by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Adapted from the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid the film is a crossover between a western and Giallo, shot on film featuring colorful images and a very pop staging. (FR)

Chris Menges, BSC, ASC, is the only cinematographer in the world to have won not only two Oscars for Cinematography in 1984 and 1986 (The Killing Fields and The Mission, both by Roland Joffé), but also the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, in 1988, for A World Apart, which he directed and which was shot by Peter Biziou, and which also won (in a tie) Best Actress for its three star actresses.

From 20 March to 3 April 2019, the Cinémathèque française is organizing, in partnership with the AFC, a retrospective dedicated to Bruno Nuytten, cinematographer and director, through a selection of 22 films out of the 30 or so feature-length films that he lit and for the most part also shot during a fifteen-year period. This selection is complemented by three short films that he shot in the early 70s and three of the films he directed (Camille Claudel, Albert Suffers and Jim, la nuit).

As part of the events organized at the end of January and the beginning of February to provide a forum for showing off the achievements of the audio-visual and cinematography industries, the AFC is organizing two days dedicated to postproduction right before the Micro Salon. They will take place at the Forum des Images on 29-30 January and will end with a Master Class by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, AFC, ASC.