Ulively excitement animated the lobby of the Jean-Eustache cinema in Pessac this Sunday, for the closing of the 34e history film festival. A very rich edition, whose pivotal theme (Spain – Portugal) combined Spanish and Portuguese cultures, histories and cinemas. At the end of a long awards ceremony, the festival revealed the theme of the 2025 edition: “Secret and lies”.
“This will make it possible to address two very transversal issues. Particularly the now essential issue of fake news, the rise of which is undermining all traditional media,” explains its director François Aymé behind the scenes. “The global development of disinformation influences government strategies or the conquest of power. Because it is very concretely involved in the training of high school and university students, the festival must make young audiences aware of this shift in the relationship with the truth, and the questioning of information.
“As for the question of secrecy, it is intimately linked to the exercise of power: the rules and duties of transparency, concealment… Everything can contribute to swinging public opinion. We saw it with the Dreyfus affairs, Watergate, Clearstream… Secrecy has fueled numerous works of cinema. And the corpus of films dealing with espionage is plethoric. »
Maria de Medeiros honoree
Twelve years after chairing the jury for the fiction competition, actress Maria de Medeiros (“To our children”, Pulp Fiction”) this year accompanied the student jury for the Danielle Le Roy prize. The festival’s board of directors awarded him its “Coup de coeur” for his film “Capitaine d’Avril”. Furthermore, the Pope Clément prize went to Portuguese producer Paulo Branco (“Mysteries of Lisbon”, by Raoul Ruiz, “No or the vain glory of commanding” by Manuel de Oliveira), who was visibly moved.
Two fictions were distinguished: the Iranian film “In the Land of Our Brothers” by Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi (professional jury prize), and “I am still here” by the Brazilian Walter Salles (student jury prize and audience prize) .
Idem, in the unpublished documentaries category, two prizes (high school students and public) recognized the same film: “Poland: women, the Pope and the Party” by Ada Grudzinski, dedicated to the laws on abortion in Poland. The professional jury chose the very radical and moving “Isolation” by the Ukrainian Igor Minaev, and that of the town of Pessac “François Mauriac, intimate memories” by Virginie Linhart.
“Beneath the screens, the waste”
At the end of the ceremony, representatives of the collective “Under the screens, la dèche”, which brings together the behind-the-scenes professionals who enable 150 film festivals to be held in France, read a message and called for their integration into the regime. intermittent entertainment workers.
When it comes time to take stock, Pessac has a smile: by reaching some 25,000 schoolchildren, the Pessac history film festival has broken a record attendance among young people. Half of his sessions were sold out. And the Pessac meeting, faced – like most events of this type – with a drop in funding, was able to resolve an economic equation more difficult than in the past. He is now looking to the future.
