FESTA MAJOR
Jean-Baptiste Alazard
France / 2024 / 70'
Ciné+ Competition, French Compétition 2024
In Fillols, just like in many villages in the French countryside, for a few summer days every year, it feels like rural flight never happened. Everybody comes back for the annual festival, to escape together for a few days and nights the humdrum routine of existence. So-called documentary cinema has often filmed this kind of celebrations. But where most films just document them, mainly chasing in vain the party and its energy, Festa Major makes it the subject of a glorification of life. Of life as it flies across faces, glances, gestures, shouts. Life that makes the beauty of each individual and the community of all. “I film the life we try to live, walking through it like in a dream.” This manifesto, stated as an opening, has been Jean-Baptiste Alazard’s since La Buissonière (FID 2013). The secret of his success remains the same: the brightness of natural lights, the sharpness of the frames, the liveliness of the editing, the music of colors. In other words, the poetics of 16mm as a transfiguration of reality. What changes with this film is the scope of the poetic endeavor, its anthropological and political significance. “Life unfolds and coils up”: everything, in Festa Major, aims at converting a line into a circle. The festival is this conversion: the gyratory movement of the dance, the circularity of seasons, the maintenance and preservation of shapes, gestures, through the passing of years. Festa Major, this feast-film, praises the cycle, the return: an ancient topos to which the worsening storm of progress, the accelerating speed of the destruction of life forms, and the piling up of ruins confer an ever more political and paradoxically revolutionary meaning. Between a medieval Occitan gest (troubadour-like prosody, stained-glass lights and colors) and a lovingly parodic take on Debord (his melancholic praise of friendship), Festa Major celebrates the marriage of cinema and life. In its full glory.
Cyril Neyrat
Date: 27 March 2025 at 6:30pm
Location: Cinéma Les Lumières, Vitrolles
31 Arcades de Cîteaux, 13127 Vitrolles