From December 4 to 8, the Autrans festival invites you to marvel and reflect on the high altitude territories while being enriched by the views of artists who go beyond the box.
Barthélémy Champenois has lost his lightness. Anxious to erase his debt to the planet himself after a long-haul flight, this scientist embarked on a mad race for carbon compensation. He wanders between calculations, doubts, individual and collective actions to find his way. Like Tipping Pointthis offbeat spectacle conference on climate change, Autrans is plowing its furrow, that “a mountain festival which seeks out different artistic forms to question us about life in this high altitude territory, about its evolution”, explains its director Anne Farrer. For its forty-first edition, from December 4 to 8, the event has become the “Autrans international festival – Mountain, cinema and culture”, recognizing a multidisciplinarity of programming that has been in effect for several years.
Tipping Point is also part of the theme of the 2024 edition: getting away from it all. “We wanted to meet the eccentrics, not the eccentrics but those who bring out emotion and energy from a creative and joyful practice,” continues Anne Farrer. The theme infused the programming, from special sessions to debates, from literary meetings to non-documentary films. We are delighted with the meeting between Charles Albert and Antoine Le Menestrel, two climbers with a different practice of climbing, the first barefoot and almost animal, the second inclined to dance. “In the musical register, we receive a big name, the singer-guitarist Rodolphe Burger who offers a creation taking place in the Jura massif around a character of the German writer Georg Büchner”, welcomes Anne Farrer. And to also cite the literary encounter with Wendy Delorme who in The song of the river, “addresses the love between two women in the mountains, highlighting the narrow vision that condemns them to the opposite of the grandeur of the landscapes.”
Another highlight, “especially since the subject arises in Autrans”a debate will deal with the transition of mountain territories while the French Alps will host the 2030 Winter Olympics. A meeting will also be devoted to the phenomenon Kaizenthis film by YouTuber Inoxtag, this non-athlete who took up the challenge of climbing Everest. A subject approached from the point of view of what it says about access to the mountain and the making of the image.
Surprise and move
And the projections in all this? There are 94 films programmed, long and short, fiction, documentaries, animations, including around sixty in competition. For the dream machine, we bet, among the documentaries, on The last expedition, the mystery of Wanda Rutkiewiczin preview, where director Eliza Kubarska follows in the footsteps of the first woman to climb K2. Engagement and majestic panoramas are also there in Wild days, an expedition film in the Denali massif in Alaska. “With a political accent, you have to see the feature film A country of resistance on a village in Calabria, a model for welcoming migrants which becomes the target of the Italian populist wave”, adds the festival director.
And then there are these nuggets, like As far as the eye can see which retraces the initiatory journey on horseback in the Kyrgyz steppes of a young visually impaired woman. Accompanied by her father, she shares with the viewer her sensation of the world – the film is broadcast in audio description.
Anne Ferrer’s favorite? The return of the projectionist. “A sort of Cinema Paradiseo in a village in Azerbaijan, with great sensitivity. The Autrans festival must continue to surprise and move people.”
Guest of the festival, will be part of the Mediadocs 2,024 jury.
Source: www.liberation.fr
