Top 20 Alternative Picks for Cannes 2012: Claudine Nougaret & Raymond Depardon’s Journal de France

Journal de France – Claudine Nougaret & Raymond Depardon

Buzz: In many ways, Depardon is to French cinema and cinéma vérité what Michel Brault is to Quebec’s Direct Cinema movement. While Depardon isn’t a pioneer of the essayistic vérité style the way Brault is for Direct Cinema, he’s still seen as a huge player in the field, having contributed major works that have helped to define it (Les années déclic, 10e chambre). Depardon’s legacy won’t solely be from his cinema; he’s perhaps even more dedicated to his practice in photography, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977. This collaborative autobiographical survey of Depardon looks to be the ultimate culmination of his two passions.

The Gist: Travelling alone, internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon spent six years capturing his home country with a large format camera. This long, solitary road trip provided fertile ground for the creation — with his long-time partner and collaborator Claudine Nougaret — of an extraordinary travel journal. The journey returned Depardon to important places from his past as a reporter — Chad, Venice, Cannes — and to a wealth of previously unseen footage from his archive — an interview with Jean-Bedel Bokassa, film of Jean-Luc Godard, extraordinary glimpses of private and public life. Intimate, compelling, revelatory, Journal de France offers a unique portrait of a country and its landscapes, an overview of a truly remarkable career and a fascinating resume of the development of the photographic art over the past half century.