Saturday, SEPT 7 / 20:00 / Peasant Museum CINema
Two of the artists invited this year at BIDFF #10, choreographer, performer and dancer Lucie Eidenbenz and director and choreographer Fu Le, put the present under the spotlight in their latest short films. While the playful and at times eccentric quadriptych Why this Now? Fire, Water, Earth, Air questions our fragmented relationship with the contemporary world and the lack of harmony, the documentary Strange Age is a window into today’s youth, going behind the scenes of Dominique Bagouet’s Jours étranges performance to capture the creative process of the thirteen young dancers of the COLINE collective.
Why this Now? Fire, Water, Earth, Air
27:00, 2023, CH
D: Lucie Eidenbenz
Why this now? is a 27-minute film series divided into four episodes — Fire, Water, Earth, Air — featuring a group of four people on a quest for something. Filled with a kind of carefree clumsiness, they gather (Fire), run (Water), help each other (Earth), disperse (Air).
We follow this tiny human group through the filter of a camera that directs our gaze towards the internal and external interactions woven with the materiality of space, and the living beings that inhabit and compose it. The humor that underlies the situations in which these characters evolve and co-create reveals a quest for connection, the tragedy of a fragmented relationship with the world, and the absurdity of certain human behaviors.
The four elements are approached in a quirky way, inviting us to consider them from a new perspective: fire is wet, water is evoked by a frantic, chaotic race akin to the power of the continuous movement of the waves, and the earth is both a vector of connection between beings who share the same soil, and an entity that rotates around itself and around the sun.
Strange age
57:00, 2024, FR
D: Fu Le
Strange Age is a window to the youth of today. The documentary takes a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process of thirteen young dancers from the COLINE training program, guided for the last 28 years by Bernadette Tripier, as they attempt to revive Dominique Bagouet's “Jours étranges” under choreographer Alban Richard. We follow the students in dance studios, opera boxes, bistros, a wasteland, a mini-bus, bearing witness to their daily lives, filled with the desires, doubts, frustrations and joys that undeniably contribute to their professional and, above all, personal development.
These images are coupled with interviews and archive images from former students of the first class back in 1997, who question the transmission of an art that is intrinsically sensitive and ephemeral, creating a parallel between two generations, two eras, two youths who share the same passion: the art of movement.