This year again, France Télévisions will award the Audience Award for a very special 48th edition of the International Comic Strip Festival. Health crisis requires, the festival will be essentially virtual at the end of January and will meet you in Angoulême next June.
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January is the month of comics. Well, normally. Like every year, phylactery addicts prepare for the traditional Charente marathon at the Angoulême international festival. We bring out the albums that we will walk, for long hours, in the interminable queues of the autograph stands. We are embarking on equally endless discussions on the quality of the official selection. We prepare our literary trip between “bubbles” of publishers, exhibition and master classes. In short, we put the boxes in the right order, we prepare “your” festival.
But, you know, none of that for this 48th edition. On January 29, thehe caustic Thomas VDB will have the heavy and impossible task of animating, all alone, the Grand Theater for a ceremony without an audience broadcast live on the internet. Those who are used to witnessing this overheated festival ritual see the scale of the challenge.
The Emmanuel Guibert exhibition at the Angoulême Museum is ready but we will have to wait a little longer for its doors to open. As expected, the organizers preferred to shift the dates of this new edition from June 24 to 27. If everything goes well.
Give “a taste for reading to a wider audience”.
So remain the books. 44 albums will compete for the coveted Fauve d’Or, prize for the best comic of the year. Our colleague Jérome Deboeuf, journalist from France 3 Poitou-Charentes in Angoulême, read them all. Jérome is indeed part of the jury of the Prix du Public France Télévisions. And yes, a little self-promotion never hurts. Since last year, your public television has partnered with the festival for this award.
This Fauve will ultimately be awarded by thirteen readers chosen from hundreds of others who sent us a cover letter. The jury chaired by Michel Field therefore had the thorny mission of offering them 8 books from the official selection.
Discover the eight titles selected for the France Télévisions Audience Prize, chosen from the Official Selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival by a committee of journalists and literature specialists from France Télévisions. pic.twitter.com/J4OI2Eaf0p
– Angoulême Festival (@bdangouleme) January 13, 2021
Obviously, we don’t all have the same vision of what a good comic book is, but a number of books have emerged such as Steven Appleby’s Dragman, Kent State or Hunting Accident. These albums were unanimous, but some of my choices were of course not retained. It’s difficult because you have to find a balance between books that can be considered “mainstream” and others that are more alternative.
Last year, it was Chloé Wary for her album “Saison des roses” which received the France Télévisions Audience Award.
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© YOHAN BONNET / AFP
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The objective is to offer a selection that shows the extent of the creativity of this particular genre that is comics, which is no small task. We try to honor a diversity of authors, backgrounds and publishing houses. The challenge is to generate an appetite among the general public for a genre that is very well known, which is often the first entry into reading for children and which is family-friendly, but which ultimately, for people who are not comic book aficionados, is little known or sometimes despised. So by offering such a diverse selection and of such quality, we also give a taste for reading to a wider audience.
When “virtual” ceremony on January 29 on the national stage in Angoulême, we should know a little more about the summer meeting of FIBD 2021. the winners of this particular vintage with therefore, in particular, the Fauve Prix du Public France Télévisions. In the meantime, the festival has decided to come and meet readers in nearly forty French stations. In Poitiers, for example, boards from “Flipette & Vénère” by Lucrèce Andreae, “Middlewest” by Skottie Young and Jorge Corona and the first volume of Edika’s anthology will be displayed.
In partnership with @ConnectGares, the 48th Festival @bdangouleme will take place throughout France. Driven by the group’s conviction to make them fully-fledged places of life, stations are emerging as new spaces for access to culture.
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– SNCF Group (@GroupeSNCF) December 17, 2020
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