The Competition
The Metrograph Pictures Library
•
2h 0m
Directed by Claire Simon | 121 mins | 2016
The Competition begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals and accepting only 40 students per year from hundreds of applicants. This Wiseman-esque documentary from Claire Simon, one of France’s premiere nonfiction filmmakers, observes the process whereby those lucky 40 are selected—a process that is revealed to be highly personal, idiosyncratic, and subject to the vagaries of taste and personal prejudice. Funny, penetrating, and surprisingly suspenseful, The Competition offers not only a unique opportunity to see the inner workings of an institution at the very heart of the French film industry but an invitation to look at the assumptions and roadblocks that shape any national film industry, and higher education in general.
A Metrograph Pictures release.
Up Next in The Metrograph Pictures Library
-
Duet for Cannibals
Directed by Susan Sontag | 105 mins | 1969
In the late ’60s, a Swedish studio invited essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag to make her directorial debut in Stockholm. The resulting film, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an ar... -
The Great Adventure
Directed by Arne Sucksdorff | 77 mins | 1953
Hailed “a masterpiece” by The New York Times when it opened at the Paris in 1955, this rhapsody of a film centers around life on a Swedish farm in the north of the country, with Sucksdorff himself portraying the farmer and his son as one of the boys wh... -
The Prairie Trilogy
Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson | 97 mins | 1978
John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, co-directors of Cannes Camera d’Or winner Northern Lights and fellow members of San Francisco’s Cine Manifest film collective, collaborated on this remarkable series of documentaries underwritten by the North Da...
