We Film the People !

We Film the People !

(Documentary, France / Poland, 2012, 57’, C / B&W, Fr ST)

by Ania Szczepanska

We Film the People !

Synopsis

How did filmmakers trained and financed by the Polish state manage to carry out an open critique of the communist system to the point of filming the fall of a regime they were supposed to serve ?

Reviews

If the documentary remains formally within the bounds (archive images, talking heads and the director’s voice-over, which is sometimes embodied on the screen), and if one can be frustrated by the constraints inherent in its duration and all that it is obliged to leave out, Nous filmons le peuple! succeeds in its rather complex challenge: that of showing, in less than an hour, how a few men have restored its nobility to the capacity for dialogue between the fabric of reality and fction, one feeding the other, contradicting it, exposing it, and even, and this is rare, infuencing it. A salutary and necessary movement in our age of mediocrity, and one that reminds us of what fction can do when man begins to struggle.Jean- Nicolas Schoeser, in the Blu-ray edition of the flm, 2015

Credits

Ania Szczepanska

Director

Film Author :

Ania Szczepanska
Ania Szczepanska

Born in Warsaw in 1982, Ania Szczepanska made her frst short flms in France, in the art section of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, before leaving for Berlin to study philosophy and cinema. On her return to Paris, she wrote a thesis in flm history on the relationship between Polish flmmakers and the communist government in Poland. Based on the archives thus discovered and interviews with the greatest Polish flmmakers and the men of power of the communist era, she made We Film the People! her frst feature-length documentary. Broadcast on French and Polish television, it was awarded the SCAM star (2015) and the CNRS grand prize (2014). A lecturer in flm history at the University of Paris 1, she conducts research on the cinema and audiovisual archives of the former Eastern bloc, mainly in Poland. She is the author of the book Do granic negocjacji (On the Borders of Negotiation, Universitas, Krakow, 2017) and co-author with Sylvie Lindeperg of À qui appartiennent les images? (Who owns the images? FMSH, 2017). In 2019, Ania Szczepanska directed Solidarnosc, la chute du mur commence en Pologne (Solidarnosc, the fall of the wall begins in Poland), broadcast on Arte.

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