The Last Shall Again Be First

Action! 

It’s noon in Lyon, on a Tuesday in March 1895. The filmer steps into the scene. He places his device on a wooden tripod. The frame is set. The turns the crank as the gates of the family factory workshop swing open. Suddenly, a crowd of workers - male and female - burst out, scattering right and left, in joyful disarray. Their movements, their eternity are revealed on seventeen meters of film: the first footage of the Cinématographe. Fifty seconds. A new art is born - raw, dazzling. Already cinema! At last, cinema!! The filmer is about to change the world by projecting animated photographic images onto a screen: Louis Lumière, the man with the Cinematographe, becomes the prime filmmaker. 

Cinema will never be an ancient art. There will always be a first film. A new filmer. Within the continuum of history of cinema, from the pioneers to contemporary authors, the 64th edition of La Semaine de la Critique celebrates this art, which with every first film, renews its promise to endure and reinvent itself. Our artistic director Ava Cahen and her committees have selected 11 feature films and 13 short films - all first or second works - revealing directors who connect the assured dawn of Louis Lumière’s cinema to its radiant future. 

There’s a vital urge in the act of discovering a film. La Semaine de la Semaine fulfills it like an act of faith: we believe in the power of cinema - in its explorations, its courage, its sensitive and radical expressions. The filmmakers we support are the trailblazers of an ever-evolving artform.  

La Semaine de la Critique’s selection shines a light on powerful works, daring in their ideas, forms, and visions. Stories that grip the mind and stir the heart. Tales that matter to us, grab us, move us. Characters who reflect or overwhelm us. Worlds where we get lost and, at times, find ourselves. In them, we see humanity, life, shadows, and glimpses of light in the darkness of our times. 

La Semaine de la Critique shows what we are, at the French Union of Film Critics: committed. We seek, we defend, we believe. Our selection committees explore cinema’s new territories in the search of new authors. Their choices affirm why critics support cinema, this powerful, free, ever-shifting, unpredictable, and surprising artform. It’s not a matter of instinct, it’s an act of faith. 

This year, as the first of all first films celebrates its 130th anniversary, Louis Lumière’s original gesture still lives on - in every film we present for the first time in May at the Cannes Film Festival, and again when La Semaine de la Critique takes its programme on tour over the following months, in France and internationally. These young filmmakers are the sons and daughters of Louis Lumière. The screenings are not a finale but an ouverture. It’s not a conclusion, but always a new beginning. At the Cannes Film Festival, at La Semaine de la Critique, first films renew the original miracle of cinema itself. LIke a reimagined Workers Leaving a Factory, today’s figures stride across the screen with that same instinctive energy.  

Nathalie Chifflet
Chairperson of the French Union of Film and Television Film Critics