Le filmeur

A revealing and upsetting diary that covers more than 10 years in the life of the film maker and his surroundings. After Ce répondeur ne prend pas de messages (1978) and La rencontre (1996), this film could be regarded as the third part of the cinematographic autobiography of Alain Cavalier, who was Film Maker in Focus in 1997 in Rotterdam. Now 74, Cavalier shares the most intimate details of his private life and that of his wife Françoise Widhoff with the audience. With all-revealing honesty, but also with tenderness and warmth, Cavalier provides an inimitable portrait of his own life. Even the most unimportant detail seems significant in this human life. Reflections in the bedroom, empty hotel rooms, feeding birds, cats and squirrels: they all seem just as important as the many times he has an operation on his face for skin cancer (and the healing process can be seen) or his parents' deaths. Cavalier shot all the footage, on his own, with a digital camera that he compares with a pen writing in the diary. In the hands of this master, this pen becomes an artistic brush. Much of the power of The filmman is in compressing the course of time. 10 years in no more than a hundred minutes. A tour de force. (SdH)