At the helm of the Cinemed – Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival for 11 years now, Christophe Leparc (also secretary general of the Directors' Fortnight since 2008) discusses the 47th edition (see the news), which will unspool from 17-25 October.

Cineuropa: Have the acute upheavals in the Eastern Mediterranean affected your line-up?
Christophe Leparc: They have mostly affected the filmmakers. We received very few movies from Israel, for instance, where there is a major issue with project censorship, with films failing to secure funding because their subjects don’t appeal to the military. On the Palestinian side, there is almost a coincidence in the timing this year, with several films ready at once, such as Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Cherien Dabis
ficha de la película] and Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 [+lee también:
crítica
ficha de la película], to which we can add Kaouther Ben Hania’s competition title The Voice of Hind Rajab [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Kaouther Ben Hania
ficha de la película]. But first and foremost, we are a film festival with an editorial line focused on auteurs and the artistic quality of their works. It is natural that Palestinian filmmakers - just as those from the former Yugoslavia did in their day - should speak about what is happening in their country and, inevitably, about conflicts. However, we will never select a film solely for its subject, because we are not a political festival. Moreover, filmmakers often need a little distance from the events they endure in order to translate them into cinema in an interesting way.

Six films directed by women feature among the nine competition titles. Is this a sign of a broader step forward?
It’s still a slightly misleading snapshot, but it is telling to see that there are more and more women filmmakers. There is an element of coincidence in the fact that we liked all of these films very much, but we had been following them closely, and many came through our development grant or our short-film selections. We shouldn’t be too hasty to get carried away, but it is remarkable - and it’s also true on the documentary side.

Spanish cinema seems in particularly fine fettle, with multiple slots across your programme.
The energy is incredible, with films in all of our showcases: Carla Simón’s Romería [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Carla Simón
ficha de la película] as the closing film, Alauda Ruíz de Azúa’s Sundays [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Alauda Ruiz de Azúa
ficha de la película] in competition, Eva Libertad’s Deaf [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Eva Libertad
ficha de la película], the documentary The Inherited Silence by Lucía Dapena González, Los tigres [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
ficha de la película] by Spain’s Alberto Rodríguez, the series The New Years [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
ficha de la serie] by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, short films and a tribute to Fernando León de Aranoa. The spectrum runs from intimate storytelling to genre cinema, and Spanish film is very strong this year - far more so, for example, than Italian cinema.

What can you say about the exposure and theatrical circulation of the full gamut of Mediterranean cinema?
We should welcome the progress, because 20 years ago, Cinemed was sometimes the only place screening films from certain Mediterranean countries. Now, if you count the number of films from the basin selected at Cannes, it’s extraordinary. Interest from French industry players - distributors and producers alike - has grown steadily, aided by all of the co-production mechanisms put in place by the CNC and supported by the Aide aux Cinémas du Monde. And the visibility offered by a festival like Montpellier to filmmakers at the short-film stage or those with their early features contributes to this gradual scaling-up, since that exposure draws the attention of French co-producers who will accompany their subsequent projects and will do everything they can to slot the films into a conventional distribution pathway.

Have the Cinemed Meetings and their various strands (the development grant, the Aflamuna meetings for projects from Arab-world countries, the From Short to Feature track and so on) created a virtuous production circle?
Our development grant was already a very solid asset, but we noticed a clear step up in the industry days when we teamed up with Aflamuna. It opened us up to other projects and other auteurs, but above all, it expanded the circle of professionals interested both in the grant projects and in those from Aflamuna. Without wishing to sound pretentious, Cinemed is a key platform and a must-attend rendezvous for all professionals across the Mediterranean basin.

This year, you are organising a Focus on Syrian cinema.
After the failure of the Arab Spring revolution in 2011 and 2012, Syrian filmmakers took a while to regain momentum, and many went into exile. Over the past three years, though, we’ve noticed Syrian films arriving again, so we decided to explore this trend, notably with the help of the Al-Ayoun young-artists collective. And we discovered a real glut of them. So, after Catalonia and Morocco, we chose to dedicate our annual focus on an emerging film industry to Syrian cinema, in order to grasp their expectations, hopes and concerns. The CNC has, incidentally, taken up our programme to try to rally institutional good will around Syria and to provide support for this young Syrian industry.