“Why do you film?” In 1987, the French daily Libération asked this question to 700 filmmakers from around the world, eliciting intriguing responses, for instance, John Huston proposed a counter-question “why not?”. The directors in this screening answer it or question the question itself. 

You film because you stand on the shoulders of giants to gain a better view of the world and leap into the creative unknown: this is the case in Prelude, which surprisingly reframes D.W. Griffith’s classic Intolerance (1916) in today’s nocturnal Kyiv, or Nonexistent, Or Like a Flash, a Japanese personal homage to Maya Deren’s experimental classic Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). 

You film to find fiction in memory, as in Tragedy – a thriller recomposed from home movies. You film because of good intentions, sometimes too far removed from reality, as the Burmese and Iranian protagonists in One Summer Day, I Drank Bubble Tea remind us. You film the traces of what is not or no longer visible – cinema tickets as proof of the years of dreams spent in a Finnish movie theatre in The Ghost Feel Hour or Jean-Luc Godard’s last cigar before his death at home in Rolle Workshop, a Journey. Godard, by the way, when asked “why do you film?”, replied “I film to avoid the question of why”.

Foreword by the programme curator: Films about filmmaking and the many personal and political reasons for picking up a camera to tell truths and lies.