11/05/2023 - The new general delegate of the Directors’ Fortnight explains the drastic changes he put in place for the Cannes parallel section

A few days from the 55th edition of the Directors' Fortnight (from 17 to 26 May as part of the 76th Cannes Film Festival), we meet up in Paris with its new general delegate, Julien Rejl.

Cineuropa: What diagnosis prompted you to instigate big changes in the editorial line of the Directors’ Fortnight
Julien Rejl: As a cinephile, a former distributor and even a former critic, I felt even before I arrived at Directors’ Fortnight that there was a homogenisation of the cinema discovered in festivals today. I was very good friends with Pierre Rissient who really contributed to clearing the landscape, to discovering filmmakers for Cannes and other festivals. According to him, since the 1990s, the landscape of major festivals had greatly evolved, with the multiplication of international sales agents and of various markets, which made it a lot harder for invisible, under-the-radar films to emerge. My own cinephilic hunger for discovering new auteurs was somewhat frustrated for a few years already. I simply asked myself why, and how I could perhaps respond to that in order to restore to the Directors' Fortnight an identity which would be strongly demarcated from that of the other sections in Cannes.

Of course, as a former distributor, I know distributors and sales agents well, and I have a good rapport with them. When I was named general delegate of Directors’ Fortnight and I told them that I wanted there to be a very distinctive and specific editorial line, several of them told me: you won’t manage to do that because in Cannes, there is the Competition on one side, for the big names, and on the other side, the other sections which take the films that are brought to them. I thought, maybe that is the reality, and I will have to work with that. But in fact, as soon as we started working on the selection with my committee, we realised that what requires an astronomical amount of work is that, among the huge numbers of films we received that didn’t come with a recommendation, were not spotted at a co-production market or a workshop, didn’t receive an advance on receipts or support from the Aide aux Cinémas du Monde fund, etc. — among them were many surprising, refreshing, innovative films. And so the process was natural: I didn’t look to go against any specific idea, but we opened the blinders, developed our curiosity, stayed open to everyone, without any discrimination, and suddenly, we found ourselves faced with a kind of cinema that we had thought no longer existed.

Do these films completely escape sales agents’ radars, or do they not interest them because they’re considered unsellable? 
It's hard to say, but the reactions since I announced the selection of this year’s Directors’ Fortnight speak for themselves. The international press reached out to me because they could find almost nothing about those films on the Internet. This truly means that these works, no one had heard of them. I don’t mean to imply that the situation is so simple, but I believe that today, there are so many places in the world where we help projects to emerge, or where co-production or financing partnerships are developed — and I think that’s wonderful — that projects from these sources are in relatively large numbers, which means other projects which were not helped remain invisible, because everyone comes to buy films in tried and tested places. It’s only from the position I’m in, at a large festival, that one can see unidentified films, films that, in a way, come from nowhere. We could even consider the idea that there is a risk for the search for projects to become an algorithmic research, based on what works today, on this or that topic, this or that actor, this or that nationality. I’m not saying that is the case, but it is a risk, an extreme we must not fall into. However that is already happening with streaming platforms, so it isn’t entirely science fiction. 

You’ve also refused to follow any gender quotas, which rather goes against most selections that seek to push for the representation of female directors. 
Selecting films directed by women to fulfil a quota, I think that is anti-feminist; it is to consider those films not for what they are, but for the sex or the gender of the person who made them. In my opinion, it wouldn’t please feminist filmmakers to know that their films were selected because there needed to be a certain number of films which fulfil certain criteria. We select films for the talent of the filmmakers, and talent isn’t gendered. However, it’s important to distinguish between the work of research, and the work of selection. The former requires paying great attention to all kinds of films and because we are well aware that films directed by women are still a minority in number, as are films directed by transgender filmmakers, or by directors from certain countries, or documentaries, etc., which are badly represented, that is where we must find new avenues of research: we have to go looking for things that are missing. But once that work is done, during the selection, there are only the films, and unique filmmakers who are not classified into categories, be they sexual, or to do with any kind of community. We’re not in the United States, we don’t make selections following community criteria. However, and without meaning to, the proportion of films directed by women in our selection is still superior to the proportion of films directed by women that were submitted. It is also possible that there is a kind of self-censorship in place, and that some women do not submit their films to big festivals; same thing for documentaries.

What about your choice "not to give priority to feature films that are potential candidates for the official competition, because the Directors’ Fortnight is most of all a place for discovery”?
Not giving them priority does not mean rejecting them from the outset, but rather that they’re not at the top of the list or prioritised against discovery films. In absolute terms, if I had loved one of those films and if it corresponded to the editorial line of Directors’ Fortnight, I would have invited it. But for 10 to 15 years, there’s been this phenomenon: films that were highly anticipated in competition would be rejected from there and would then end up in Directors’ Fortnight. It’s not for nothing that Thierry Frémaux then created Cannes Premieres: to give a place in Official selection to filmmakers who had missed out on the competition and whose work he wanted to show, and also perhaps to stop those films from being shown elsewhere. I believe that Directors’ Fortnight does different work, that it must be repeated that this is a fully fledged selection within the Cannes Film Festival, a completely independent section, and, in the spirit of 1969, that it has to be kind of a counter programme. In that sense, I cannot say: I will take the films that the Official selection does not want. By doing that, I would be ruining my own programme! I have nothing against these films, or against the filmmakers who make them, but I need to create an identity. These films that could have arrived in Directors’ Fortnight or in the Official selection already have a certain cachet in terms of international fame, known cast, cinematic accomplishment. But should I prioritise a young Vietnamese filmmaker making his first feature and who without Cannes and Directors’ Fortnight would perhaps never emerge, or should I prioritise someone who was already expected among the big names in Official Competition forecasts? Personally, I give priority to the debut feature. And regarding these established filmmakers who wanted to be in Competition, if I find that their new film is less good than their previous work, there’s no reason for Directors’ Fortnight to show it. I also want to fight against something else: if a film is shown to Directors’ Fortnight and to Official selection at the same time, and the team behind the film is honest enough to say that Thierry Frémaux has priority but that if he doesn’t want it, they would be interested in going to Directors’ Fortnight — in that case, I do consider the film. However, and what is happening more and more often, is that certain people wait for the day of the Official selection press conference, and if they find their film isn’t selected there, then suddenly they want to show it to us: that, I’m against. 

Why have you reduced the selection to 19 feature films getting their world premiere?
To give the films better exposure and to have a coherent editorial line. For the Directors’ Fortnight label to mean something, we have to make it a little more scarce, so that each film can stand on its own, with enough space to live, and isn’t lost within a massive selection. Furthermore, I’ve decided to put the films of the selection in cinemas starting in June, even though they do not all have distributors, because I want arthouse audiences in a certain number of big cities in France to be able to access them at preview screenings, giving the films a chance to have better visibility and to meet their audience, and therefore inciting distributors to hopefully acquire these films. 

The French presence in the selection has been rather severely reduced. Why?
First of all, there is a mechanical effect: with fewer films in selection, proportions change. With fewer slots, we try to have a selection that is as diverse as possible. For French cinema, I went for works that seemed to me the most audacious, but I was also slightly disappointed in young French creation. I was expecting more discoveries but in the end, the four French filmmakers selected are not there with their first or second features. However those were the best films, the richest, the most audacious.

What about the rest of your European cinema, beside the select few which include one Spanish female director, a Portuguese duo, and one or perhaps two Belgian directors (with one Cameroonian filmmaker living in Belgium) ?
We had submissions from the Balkans that made me hesitate for a long time. There is also a genuine renewal of Romanian cinema, and I don’t know if we consider Turkey to be European here, but there were also some very interesting submissions from there. Besides, talking about countries bordering Asia and Europe, Georgia is also present in the selection. Otherwise, we traveled a lot, in Poland for example, and I did some very specific work with the Czech Republic. But as was the case with Scandinavian countries, nothing specific ended up in the final shortlist. 

Do you have a favourite among the films in your selection?
I don’t want to place one film above the others, but there is one film that feels rather emblematic of what we’ve done, which is that we’ve found a film for the entire family, children included, and for cinephiles too: Riddle of Fire [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Weston Razooli. To see that it is possible to rekindle a type of cinema which isn’t aimed at only one age demographic, and which knows how to play with the codes of children’s movies to make a real cinematic suggestion, I think it’s a beautiful signal sent to the industry, and I hope that the film will be very successful in cinemas to encourage more of this kind of films to be produced.

(Translated from French)