08/11/2024 - The festival director shed light on the event’s 25th edition, a form of European cinema sometimes insufficiently showcased, the emergence of new talent and the different audience tastes

The director of the Arras Film Festival - which she founded with general delegate Éric Miot - Nadia Paschetto chatted to us about the event’s 25th edition which kicks off today (read our articles here and here).

Cineuropa: The Arras Film Festival is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Do you feel you’ve met your objectives?
Nadia Paschetto: Our aim has always been to shine a light on European cinema in all its diversity, with a preference for films from eastern countries. Right from the outset, we sought to show films which weren’t often broadcast in France, to honour them and to try - by way of competitions but also through other sections, because we’ve realised that it works – to attract French distributors who are travelling to Arras to do a bit of shopping, who fall for one film or another, and who end up buying it.

The other challenge, which we took on once the festival was properly established, was to help young authors make their names and bring their subsequent projects to life. So we’ve put a lot of emphasis on the Arras Days professional sidebar over the past few years. The festival was structured, built and developed over time until it found its place within the film event landscape. We’re now well-known and renowned for our work with European cinema, both in France and across the rest of the Old Continent.

Your festival is also renowned for its huge conviviality and popularity (boasting 48,000 viewers last year; in other words, outnumbering the town’s entire population).
Our intention isn’t to screen niche films, we want people to discover films which are accessible to all, to each and every age and viewer bracket, exploring social issues and incredibly human subjects which drill down into families, what is it to be a European citizen today, the difficulties different people face, all in order to fuel meaningful exchanges between the audience and the filmmakers who come here to present their films.

So ours is an eclectic line-up: there’s something for everyone, where the idea is to discover a different and, most importantly, high-quality kind of film. And it’s also crucial to us, over and above films from the rest of Europe, to show what it is we do best in French film. This year, we’re lucky enough to have two great actresses as guests of honour: Cécile de France and Sandrine Kiberlain, as well as the brilliant Serbian actor Miki Manojlovic.

You have two focuses this year, one on Italy and the other on the Czech Republic.
Italian cinema is in really good shape; there were lots of very high-level films to choose from, and so as not to be forced into making tough decisions, we decided to dedicate a focus to them in the European Discoveries section, as we have done in the past for Belgian and German cinema. The Czech Republic, for its part, relates to the Arras Days professional sidebar because, beyond traditional pitching for our Development Grant, we decided, from 2022 onwards, to shine a light on individual countries. After Slovenia in 2022 and Croatia last year, we’ll be presenting 5 Czech projects (two works in progress and three in development) on Sunday 17 November. We also decided, on the festival side, to screen a Czech film in competition (Waves [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jiří Mádl
film profile] by Jiri Madl) and to host a focus session comprising three films in the Eastern Selection.

With a few rare exceptions, and notwithstanding the Romanian wave which seems to have endured over time, do filmmakers from Eastern Europe often struggle to make their mark over the long-term when it comes to international recognition? How would you explain this?
Everything has become very strained in terms of distribution, including in France, even though it’s still a very open country compared to other European regions, where films from Eastern Europe are hardly ever distributed anymore. The issue is two-fold. Firstly, funding for these films can sometimes be complicated in their own countries, where international co-productions are mandatory, which makes things complex and takes time. Some of these countries have also experienced budget cuts to their culture sectors, sometimes accompanied by rising nationalism. These socio-political-financial considerations are hinderances for emerging authors. And their films can only enjoy a real presence with the help of festivals. We try to raise their profile, but we can’t control what happens after that. But there are some really promising authors arriving on the scene, like Bulgaria’s Nadejda Koseva, for example.

(Translated from French)