Meeting with
Robert Guédiguian and Ariane Ascaride

Born in 1953, he is one of the most interesting revelations of French cinema between the Eighties and the Nineties. His films, usually staged in the popular neighborhoods of Marseille, tell the stories of workers and the tensions – but at the same time the benefits – derived from the presence of a large community of immigrants. It is an interest toward the theme of migration that comes from the origin of Guédiguian himself: his mother was German and his paternal grandfather was Armenian. The director documents the reality of a fragmented social sphere: a discouraged and vulnerable population – devastated by an uncontrolled globalization and by problems of work, drugs and small criminality – yet he manages to avoid to fall into an easy nihilism. He shows a solid working culture and its spirit of resistance and to the refusal to renounce to hope. Among the contemporary French directors it is difficult to find a similar creative project. Guédiguian’s attempt is to make a social and at the same time popular cinema: a cinema available to everyone. If some of his films remained within the limits of the cinéma d’auteur, the success of Marius and Jeannette (1997),  Charge! and The Town Is Quiet (2000), until the most recent The Last Mitterand (2005) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011), made him well known to a much wider audience and realized his wish to be able to “intervene in the world we live.” The section will screen all his 17 featured films as director.