During the 43rd edition of the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, which is being held online until February 6, “Télérama” shares its six favorites with you. Today “Vas-y voir”, a moving story by Dinah Ekchajzer which can be seen until February 12 on Télérama.fr, with the kind authorization of La Fémis.
Published on February 05, 2021 at 8:00 p.m.
Updated on February 15, 2021 at 11:12 a.m.
Hor field, the voice of a little girl named Félicie, who promises us that she will “telling a very beautiful story: Babar’s mother”. The album is before our eyes but it’s a trompe-l’oeil. In fact pachydermic tale, it is other filial love relationships that are discussed in this documentary of great delicacy – the end-of-study film at La Fémis by its author. First, the one that united Félicie, Dinah Ekchajzer’s mother, to her own mother Madeleine, a young divorced cooperator in Africa in the 1960s. But also the one that today links the director to her own mother, as well as to this grandmother whom she knew so little, and with whom she shares the same obvious taste for cinema, images, memories… Snippets of solar and joyful stories, which come to life through a set of archives as rich as they are delicately woven, where the sound recordings respond to discreet animated sequences, the slides to the interviews carried out by Madeleine, who notably worked in Niger for the creation of a film school. A moving story.
The broadcast on Télérama.fr is now over
Who are you ? (civil status, age, particular signs)
My name is Dinah Ekchajzer and I am 26 years old (1).
Your background before this film?
After a BAC L, audiovisual cinema option in Meudon, I went to study cinema and comparative literature at the University of Montreal for two years. I then did a one-year Erasmus in a small village in Sweden to, on my return, integrate the IEP of Grenoble within a master’s degree in cultural policies.
I had long wanted to join the Fémis, and it was in 2016, after two attempts, that I entered to learn editing.
“I don’t believe at all that the short film is the ‘poor relation’ of the feature film.”
Why this short today?
Go see it is my graduation film. The constraint imposed on the editors during their final year is to produce and edit a film made up mostly of archive footage.
Dinah Ekchajzer : “Making this film was a way for me to get to know my grandmother and to discover, through her, the era of the Cooperation and my mother’s childhood”. clermont-filmfest.org
I took this opportunity to rummage through my parents’ cupboards and take possession of the many images and sounds recorded by my grandmother during her years spent in Africa. Making this film was a way for me to get to know her and discover, through her, the era of the Cooperation and my mother’s childhood.
Name three filmmakers or three films that made you want to make films, that influenced you?
The two filmmakers who marked my cinephilia the most, at very different stages of my life, are Jacques Doillon and Alain Cavalier. The movies that I love most are Ponette, The Funny et Young Wether, at the first. The encounter et Irene at the second.
What is your profession, short filmmaker?
I am a young editor. I am currently working on short films, fictions and documentaries, and I am sometimes an assistant editor on feature films.
After the short, necessarily the long?
I don’t believe at all that the short film is the “poor relation” of the feature film, nor that the feature film is necessarily the ultimate achievement for a filmmaker. I have the impression that ideally, if we put the economic constraints of cinema aside, it is the subject and the story of a film that should dictate its duration.
Your story with Clermont?
I never came to Clermont-Ferrand as a spectator, but I have often heard of the festival as a major event for short films. One of the first ones I ridden, Gouville’s Jellyfish, by Paul Nouhet, was also selected in Clermont-Ferrand two years ago.
The best short film of the last ten years?
I remember being very marked by a short film on delivery men on bicycles, screened at the Estates General of Documentary Film, in Lussas, two years ago: war of cents, by Nader S. Ayach. Its “amateur” aspect gives the film great strength, and there is a brilliant split screen inside (an editing effect that I am particularly fond of)!
The best short film of all time?
I would say Fear, little hunter, by Laurent Achard. A sequence shot, fixed, of nine minutes where the essential of the dramaturgy is played out to sound, off camera. I was very impressed by this film which, in its radicalness, completely embraces the short format.
