– The head of the French Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion sheds light on ACID’s mission in Cannes and its 2026 selection
(© Laurie Bisceglia)
Looking to offer visibility to high-quality, independent works which don’t often enjoy adequate broadcasting and with an editorial line focused on audacity and diversity, the ACID (Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion) sidebar will unspool on the Croisette for the 34th time (read our article), between 13 and 22 May, within the 79th Cannes Film Festival.
Cineuropa: What is the aim of ACID in Cannes, where you seem to be in a David-Goliath situation with the festival’s other selections?
Pauline Ginot: It’s more a case of us developing our selections together and complementing one another. ACID is quite a unique space because, to my knowledge, it’s the only festival in the world programmed by filmmakers. Filmmakers watch films by other filmmakers and decide to engage to ensure these films are seen by as wide an audience as possible. Cannes is the first step in this process for us. We select films which don’t tend to have distributors, so we actively seek out distributors – as we’re currently doing now – but we also find international sales agents for films which don’t have them, and we support them vis-a-vis the press, to ensure these films pass through all the stages involved in reaching audiences. In Cannes, we mostly show these films to cinema operators, as well as festival programmers and anyone who works in broadcasting. Our position revolves around ensuring this kind of attention for films which might have had problems in the pre-funding phase. We try to keep air circulating around these works, which the market is contracting around more and more with every passing day. This is the case for creative documentaries but also first fiction feature films with budgets under €3m. We’ve also got an animated movie this year, called Blaise, by Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue, which was produced by Alexandre Gavras and which has a distributor and an international sales agent, but which was made with €1.3m, which is very little for an animated film. So it’s clear things aren’t easy in this respect. They’re films we have to support throughout the entire year because, these days, in France, either films enjoy maximum exposure on their release or they have to work for it on an ongoing basis. It’s our area of expertise. Cannes is only the beginning of our journey all throughout France with these films.
Your 2026 selection includes nine feature films which will screen in world premières. Where do these films come from?
We received over 650 films, a huge number of which came from all over the world. We reserve a lot of room for French cinema, which accounts for six of the nine feature films selected. It’s a lot, we’re very aware of this, but we’re also aware that if we reduce the space available for French cinema, the works we exclude would be the ones which already tend to be excluded elsewhere. And we need these six spots, as a bare minimum, to be able to show the great diversity of French cinema, in documentary terms too.
First films by Justine Triet, Kaouther Ben Hania, Alain Gomis, Claire Simon, the Larrieu brothers and many others have previously been selected in the ACID line-up. Who can we expect to discover this year?
Incidentally, Radu Jude was also in the ACID selection in 2009 with his first feature, The Happiest Girl in the World. Our programming committee – including filmmakers ranging from Martin Jauvat to Sylvain George, by way of Déni Omar Pitssae – is composed of professionals with some really wide-ranging tastes. Our aim is for everyone to be able to find something that interests them in an eclectic line-up. Our opening film, Mauvaise étoile by Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier, which has already secured a distributor, is somewhat reminiscent of Patricia Mazuy’s early films. It covers 24 hours in the life of a really likeable woman who we gradually learn is in an abusive relationship. The actors are wonderful, they’re all non-professionals, and it’s a fascinating and highly researched film about sexist, sexual violence, which gradually builds momentum rather than going in heavy-handed from the get-go.
Blaise, which I mentioned earlier and which revolves around a character from a comic book which was turned into a series, is a hilarious, satirical social comedy about the middle classes and their continual need for validation, with a really powerful and not-often-seen style of animation.
Another first film is Barça Zou by Paul Nouhet. It’s a kind of anti-coming-of-age tale which is full of humour, affection and melancholy, following four friends who go on a skateboarding weekend in Barcelona. The film looks at adolescence across two different time periods: during that particular weekend and ten years later, when the characters are looking back on it.
We also have a hybrid Swiss film called Virages in the line-up, by Céline Carridroit and Aline Suter: a feel-good summer movie set in Geneva and revolving around a female character who’s a highly skilled mechanic from the queer underground and who decides to fix up a Beetle for a race. It’s a really gentle comedy shot like a documentary, which feels very Mad Max at certain points.
Serbian Ivan Marković, who lives in Germany and is Angela Schanelec’s director of photography, shot a fiction film in Cambodia at a time of great change, called Promised Spaces. It follows various protagonists during the construction of a super-modern home: a farmer who turns into a builder, project managers, the people tasked with selling these places, the people who are starting to live in them, etc. It’s a film which is politically and poetically powerful on account of its visual accuracy.
Living Twice, Dying Thrice by Iran’s Karim Lakzadeh rounds off your selection of fiction films, but you’re also presenting three documentaries, one of which indirectly references Iran.
Yes, Dans la gueule de l’ogre by Mahsa Karampour, who’s been living in France for a very long time and who decides to meet up with his brother who’s living in exile in the US. He was the leader of the Yellow Dogs group who appeared in Cannes Un Certain Regard section in 2009 in No-One Knows About Persian Cats. It’s about a survivor, the brothers’ fragile relationship, the Iran they knew as children, but it’s also a more intimate story about the challenges that come with exile. It’s a breathtaking film which ends with the bombs dropping.
Cœur secret by Tom Fontenille starts out as a modest, intimate documentary before exploding into a melodrama and family saga. It’s a brilliant film about talking, about how the camera allows this, and about emotions. Following the death of the mother, a small family find themselves grieving, and the father tries to explain what he doesn’t want to explain to his children: the beginning of his gender transition.
Last but not least, La détention by Guillaume Massart, which is set in France’s National Penitentiary Administration School, revolves around prison without ever actually showing it to us. It opens a window onto an extremely closed-off world by way of all kinds of off-camera ruses and a tightly controlled mise en scène approach, which is reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s work. It’s a film about order and norms, which actually probes our institutions, their dysfunctional sides, and, indirectly, our relationship with authority.
(Translated from French)
