La Gaîté Lyrique | Notre Monde

Between manifesto and documentary, this film transforms a reflection into a bright matter.

Notre Monde

Directed by Thomas Lacoste (119’, 2013)
Produced by La bande passante
Distributed by Shellac

With Thomas Lacoste and other guests in attendance (details to follow shortly)

Bringing together more than 35 speakers, philosophers, sociologists, economists, judges, doctors, academics and writers, Our World provides a forum for expression in order to work, as Jean-Luc Nancy invites us to do so, at achieving "a common thought."
More than just an open forum for speech, Our World is based on an abundant collection of concrete proposals that act as an individual, collective, and critical reminder: "engage in politics" and preferably in a different way.
Thomas Lacoste, founder of The Other Campaign parallel to the 2007 presidential campaign and author of the interviews Penser critique (Critical Thinking), an ethical and political survival kit for crisis situations (47 films, 24, Editions Montparnasse, 2012), offers here a deep breath of air, like a pause in the fast-paced world of politics.

Trailer
Website

« Happiness is
a Warm Gun »

Curated by Benoît Hické*, this deliberately prospective screening series provides an extension to the Happy Show exhibition by questioning the meaning of community: is together really better? How to take action? What is love? Is it possible to laugh at everything? Colorful images, animated guests, smiles and theories: "Happiness is a Warm Gun" will consist of three evenings of screenings (political documentaries, previously unseen features, and artist films) with the filmmakers in attendance.

*Benoît Hické is a journalist and film programmer, namely for the Museum of Natural History, la Gaîté lyrique (the musiquepointdoc series, screenings programmed as part of the exhibit 2062, and F.A.M.E - Film & Music Experience) and the Museum of Hunting and Nature.

Excerpt of an interview with Thomas Lacoste for the magazine Les Inrocks (3/17/2013): "The antinomy of documentary versus fiction is always problematic for me, as is often the case with disciplinary categories. Certainly, there is a bit of everything: intervention, manifesto, etc. But we're looking to go beyond those notions and to subvert them, and to move towards other areas, using fiction for example—which is the structural base of the film, and which carries the thunderous murmurs of Marie Ndiaye's writing and one of her characters, the deeply affecting Khady Demba—, or on relying on sound design (with Olivier Samouillan's meticulous musical work), etc. Our World is an unidentified cinematic object. A film in acts. The story of a life and its potential (political, emotional, aesthetic) contained in a cinematic sentence that caters to all. A world-sentence that seeks to watch us, to speak of the unbearable present, of how far and how long... of that which is unbearable and that which is desirable.
This goes through different segments: education, health, civil liberties, borders, media, culture, work, economics, international policies, conditions of democracy, to finish with the new realm of politics. Environmental issues are unfortunately absent due to an incident during the shoot that made it impossible for Geneviève Azam to join us for the public recording (Editor's note: April 11 at the Maison des métallos). For lack of anything better, and well aware of the non-issue, I call these cinematic objects, border-films. This doesn't mean they don't share any common characteristics—it's a given that artistic creation ex nihilo does not exist—with a certain history of cinema: Vertov, Godard, Pasolini, Debord, Marker, Watkins, Kramer, and Keuken, or, more recently, Des Pallières, to name the most famous. One of the challenges for us with this film was to give shape to the mind (with the help of our DP, veteran Irina Lubtchansky), to shoot voices and bodies that think, by placing the active viewer closer to the speaker. With this closeness, we wanted to create a disturbing softness, a sensual proximity, a direct and unmediated relationship in the pursuit of a demanding and collective political experience. Our World is trying to generate an intimate conversation (the kind that we lack so much these days...), a radical rethinking of what transmission could be, the one that calls into question our representations and that would make it possible, finally, for us to change."