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SOLOTHURN 2015

The Solothurn Film Festival reflects on cinema as a collective art

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- Thanks to its Focus sidebar, the 50th edition of the Solothurn Film Festival launches the debate on a new way of looking at the cinematic creation

The Solothurn Film Festival reflects on cinema as a collective art

What is cinema if it’s not an art, a collective odyssey where the vision of a single individual (the director) must be supported by a collective (actors, a technical team or even producers and distributors) in order to see the light of day? And what better to ask than a group of friends with a similar artistic vision to produce what will later be called “film”? In an attempt to respond to this and many other questions, the 50th edition of the Solothurn Film Festival has decided to devote its Focus section to the “spontaneous generations”, a kind of repository of ideas dominated by a powerful and shared artistic vision.

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Aside from a series of round tables and debates, seven films will be screened (mainly new releases in Switzerland) that are emblematic of this growing trend of working in collectives. The director Seraina Rohrer wants to create a debate, to reflect on these groups of directors and sometimes producers also, who come together to “make cinema” in a different way, aware of the power of their own ideas and of the often subversive power of film. What these collectives have in common is the will to find the time to reflect and debate the content of movies before thinking about the complex inner workings of production and distribution. Cinema is seen as an art, a form of expression, that’s both complex and permeable that needs to be fed with debates and called into question in a context that could be defined as “familiar”.

One of the common models for these collectives is the famous Groupe 5 created in the 60s by symbolic directors like Tanner, Goretta and Soutter who participated in the birth of new Swiss cinema. Guests of this Focus are the German group Fogma, the European Film Conspiracy from Vienna, French production company Année Zéro, German-Austrian production company Coop99, the Cultural Association of Saint-Denis Les enfants de la dalle, the artistic and theoretical platform (Walking Theory) born in Belgrade, Zurich collective 8Horses and not forgetting the Swiss-French association Climage that this year celebrates thirty years of business.

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(Translated from Italian)

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