les ateliers varan I - what’s real and what’s not

Over the course of three ses­sions, Ate­lier Varan presents a selec­tion of films pro­duced as part of the Varan work­shops, cre­at­ed 45 years ago. Above all they reflect a vision of doc­u­men­tary cinema, under two themes: Towards the Dream, and What is Real and What is Not.  The film Le pont Mirabeau by Elie Rajaonarai­son, stem­ming from the very first work­shop in 1980, por­trays a clash of perspectives—through Guil­laume Apollinaire’s poem and the French reality—offering a sharp alert to con­tra­dic­tion. At the time, the Varan work­shops func­tioned as a kind of lab­o­ra­to­ry, where trainees from dif­fer­ent coun­tries came to make films in France. The mentors—around ten at the time—were mostly ini­ti­at­ed by Jean Rouch. Vin­cent and Sev­erin Blanchet, his former assis­tants during uni­ver­si­ty train­ings, along with Elis­a­beth Kap­nist, Patrick Genet, Jean-Paul Beau­viala, Jean-Noël Cris­tiani, and André Van In, passed on their knowl­edge not through theory, but through hands-on learn­ing: by doing, invent­ing, and experimenting.  Just as Jean Rouch led a work­shop in Mozam­bique in 1978 at the request of cul­tur­al attaché Jacques d’Arthuis, the aim of the inter­na­tion­al work­shops was to … read more