La Fémis is the state film school in Paris once known as IDHEC. Every year several hundred applicants for new places are put through a competitive entrance exam which can last for three months and three rounds of ‘analysis’ (in this case of a clip from a Kurosawa Kiyoshi film), projects and interviews. Claire Simon’s documentary follows one cohort through all three phases and finishes with the group photograph celebrating the formal acceptance of the small group of successful applicants (around 40?). Simon herself is a graduate of the school and she follows the individual candidates objectively – this isn’t like reality TV.
La Fémis works on the principle that industry personnel are responsible for selecting each year’s new intake using an agreed set of guidelines and as we might expect, the most gripping parts of the documentary are arguably those in which we see these practitioners arguing among themselves about who should be accepted.
It’s very difficult for me to know how this film might be received by audiences with little sense of the issues at stake in an exercise like this. I’ve spent a large chunk of my working life thinking about examining and assessing students and I was fascinated by this insight. All the interview panels and assessors took their roles seriously – but often ended up with contradictory conclusions about who was a suitable applicant to recommend. In the clip below, disagreement about a candidate in Round 2 (the project) hinges on if it matters that he is ‘crazy’ – and someone wonders how a Cronenberg or a Dreyer would have got on in a competition like this:
La Fémis takes candidates for distinct specialist roles such as director, screenwriter, cinematographer etc. I was also pleased to see that there is now an intake of students who want to specialise in film distribution – and we see some being interviewed by cinema owners and distributors. Later, in the Q & A after the screening, we heard that La Fémis also now takes students from ‘diverse’ backgrounds for one-year courses to enable them to network and make contacts with industry personnel. This sounds like a progressive move, but I hope that they will also increase the number of students from diverse backgrounds for the standard four-year course. In relation to this Claire Simon made an important point in the Q & A when she said that she realised, in the edit suite, that only students from certain backgrounds were able to talk about themselves in interviews in the ways expected by the applications procedures. This puts pressure on the practitioners on interview panels who have to look for the signs of an applicant who could develop these skills even if they don’t have them at the moment. It might also suggest that the system needs tweaking.
I’m not sure what the possibility of seeing this film in the UK will be but if you get the chance I would heartily recommend it. I was impressed by the industry personnel taking part in the selection process. They were actively seeking to select students who might benefit from the course. Some were more progressive than others but all had a very realistic view of the opportunities and were genuinely trying to help candidates whilst also trying to maintain standards – and protecting their colleagues from candidates who might be difficult to work with and not productive. It isn’t an easy task. I don’t know how La Fémis compares to film schools elsewhere but this film confirmed my view of French cinema as healthy in the current climate.
The Case for Global Film 