FIDMarseille at 30: A Retrospective on Avant-Garde Cinema

The FIDMarseille festival, originally the Festival International du Documentaire, rebranded in 2011 as the Festival International de Cinéma, celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2019. The festival, held from July 9 to 15 in Marseille, has been a platform for avant-garde and boundary-blurring cinema. In 2002, newly appointed delegate general Jean-Pierre Rehm screened Jean Eustache's 'Numéro zéro' (1971), a film believed lost, exhumed by Pedro Costa and Jean-Marie Straub. The film, a continuous interview with Eustache's grandmother, was presented uncut, emphasizing the inseparability of raw testimony and mise-en-scène. This set the tone for the festival's rejection of rigid genre distinctions between documentary and fiction. In 2003, Wang Bing's nine-hour DV film 'West of the Rails' premiered in France at FID, winning its first international prize. The film documents the collapse of an industrial site, made on a minimal budget with digital technology. Other notable films include Pierre Creton's 'L'Heure du berger' (2008), Manon de Boer's 'Two Times' (2008), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 'Phantoms of Nabua' (2009). The festival also featured thematic screens, including one dedicated to sound, and retrospectives of directors such as Roger Corman, Hong Sang-soo, and Werner Herzog. The article, originally published in artpress in July-August 2017, traces the festival's history and its commitment to idiosyncratic, genre-defying cinema.