Casting a stone at other European metropolises, architect Le Corbusier once said that by taking a single step in Paris “we recover our ability to judge.” In collaboration with one of the world’s most important film memory institutions – the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, which has made appearances in French New Wave – RIGA IFF has created an extraordinary and untamed urban excursion, a city symphony selection to be screened in a single session.

The six short films, made between 1928 and 1999, reveal better-known and quieter neighbourhoods of Paris, odes to architectural forms, transitions of the seasons, human stories, and mythmaking about a metropolis pulsating with artistic ideas – that can also bring about hunger, alienation, and cold. The selection includes fiction, documentary, and hybrid works by journalist Lucie Derain, poetic realism classic René Clair, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, and other voices from the French cinematic space.

What is the city of light to the moving image? Paris is the birthplace of cinema, where brothers Lumière first amazed audiences with their “motion picture mechanism”. It is a post-war hub of cultural tumult and modernist waves, where younger generations push back against their elders, and out-of-towners and immigrants fight for the wellbeing of their offspring. Meanwhile, the middle class is ready to take to the streets to dissent, while tourists sigh and groan upon seeing the city’s most iconic buildings and massive developments. It also has everything we’ve seen in the scantiest shadows of pop culture imagination – and this six-film selection throws a stone-like challenge at the familiar, the seen, and the imagined.

Foreword by the programme curator: Possibly the most lauded and filmed metropolis in six short films by grand masters. Straying away from the tourist group, this will be a flânerie spanning eight decades – through summers and snowfalls, getting drunk on absinthe, models perched on rooftops, photo negatives, and memories of modernist ideals.