17th Film Encounters

The aim of these meetings is to introduce a diverse audience to the perspective on rural life as portrayed in cinema, and the representations given of it, with a different theme each year.

In open landscapes, remote villages, and territories sometimes called peripheral, the most essential battles are often fought. Since its inception, the CAMÉRA EN CAMPAGNE festival has explored these places where rural life is not merely a backdrop but a space of tensions, attachments, struggles, and hopes. This year, we have chosen to look at these territories through a simple yet powerful word: resistance. To resist is sometimes to say no. No to violence, to injustice, to the erasure of cultures or landscapes. But to resist is also to hold on, to preserve, to pass on, to invent other ways of living together. The films gathered in this edition tell the stories of these multifaceted forms of resistance.
There is resistance against oppression and war, as in Timbuktu, The Silence of the Sea, or The Voice of Aida, where ordinary individuals confront forces beyond their control. These are discreet, sometimes silent acts, but imbued with profound dignity. There is also the resistance of territories and communities in the face of global upheaval. In The Old Oak, Costa Brava, Lebanon, or Digger, villages, landscapes, and inhabitants strive to preserve their identity in the face of social, political, and ecological fractures. Some forms of resistance are also those of nature itself. Evil Does Not Exist or Red Forest remind us how rural landscapes are now places where fundamental conflicts are played out concerning the environment, memory, and our relationship with the living world. Other films celebrate intimate resistance: that of women who refuse imposed roles (Mustang, The Source of Women), that of young people searching for their place (Queen of a Summer), or that of singular individuals who, against all odds, continue to defend their community or their knowledge (Sibel, Muganga, the Healer). Finally, some forms of resistance take the form of the tale, the myth of resistance, or the legend. Wolfwalkers or The Adventures of Robin Hood remind us that, throughout history, folk stories have recounted the struggle against injustice and the hope for a more just world. Whether political, ecological, cultural, or personal, resistance runs through all these stories. It is not always spectacular. Sometimes it lies in a glance, in a stubborn refusal, in a fragile solidarity, in the attachment to a land or a community. In the countryside, as elsewhere, resisting often means continuing to build a world together.