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 … mehr