From May 18 to 26, Visions Sociales offers a selection of 20 films, professional meetings, debates, and exchanges with directors. For 11 years, on the sidelines of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, VISIONS SOCIALES has focused on showcasing ambitious auteur cinema that attempts to question social order and the state of the world.
This year, the event highlights American independent cinema, with a selection of films representative of its diversity and richness.
Women will be honored, both actresses and directors, allowing audiences to explore the world in their footsteps and measure progress or terrible regressions.
Short films, fictions, documentaries, and films from our partners make up a program that we hope will open doors to ever-discoverable universes, so that year after year, your cinema experience can grow in pleasure and knowledge.
2013 Program
*The Great Turnaround by Gรฉrard Mordillat*
Fiction / France / 2012 / 1 hour 17 minutes – Starring Franรงois Morel, Jacques Weber, Edouard Baer, Patrick Mille.
Based on Frรฉdรฉric Lordon’s play “From One Reversal to Another. A Serious Comedy on the Financial Crisis.”
Synopsis: It’s the crisis, the stock market is plummeting, banks are on the brink of bankruptcy, credit is dead, the economy is dying… To save themselves, bankers turn to the State. The hated State suddenly becomes the savior! Citizens will pay for the system to continue, for the rich to remain rich, and the poor to stay poor. Adapted from Frรฉdรฉric Lordon’s play, this contemporary story is told in classic alexandrines. It’s as tragic as Racine, as comical as Moliรจre…
*Violeta by Andrรฉs Wood*
Fiction / Argentina, Brazil, Chile / 2012 / 1 hour 50 minutes – Starring Francisca Gavilรกn (Violeta Parra), Thomas Durand (Gilbert Favre), Stephania Barbagelata (Carmen Luisa), Roberto Farรญas (Luis Arce)
Synopsis: In the 1950s, Violeta Parra travels across Chile to collect and record her country’s traditional songs. She becomes aware of both the cultural richness of the people and the social conditions of those she meets. This is what she will express through her songs, paintings, tapestries, ceramics, in Chile and around the world. A true icon of Chilean culture, a significant figure of social and political transgression that continues to inspire new generations, Violeta Parra deserved this beautiful cinematic tribute. Andrรฉs Wood revisits Chile’s history and delivers an emotional musical portrait, carried by Francisca Gavilรกn, an actress in perfect harmony with this artist whose life was marked by passion.
*Blanca Nieves by Pablo Berger*
Fiction / Spanish-French / 2012 / 1 hour 44 minutes – Actors: Maribel Verdรบ, Daniel Gimenez-Cacho, รngela Molina
Synopsis: Southern Spain in the 1920s. Carmen is a beautiful young girl whose childhood has been haunted by a spiteful stepmother. Fleeing a past she no longer remembers, Carmen makes an unusual encounter with a traveling troupe of dwarf bullfighters who adopt her and give her the nickname “Blancanieves.” It’s the beginning of an adventure that will lead Carmen/Blancanieves to discover herself, her past, and especially a destiny unlike any other…
*Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin*
Fiction / USA / 2012 / 1 hour 32 minutes – Starring: Henry Dwight, Levy Easterly, Pamela Harper, Amber Henry
Synopsis: Hushpuppy, six years old, lives in the bayou with her father. Suddenly, nature gets out of hand, temperatures rise, glaciers melt, releasing an army of aurochs. With rising waters, the eruption of the aurochs, and her father’s declining health, Hushpuppy decides to search for her missing mother.
*Wadjda by Haifaa Al-Mansour*
Fiction / Saudi Arabia / 2013 / 1 hour 37 minutes – Starring Waad Mohammed, Reem Abdullah
Synopsis: Wadjda, twelve years old, lives in a suburb of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Although she grows up in a conservative environment, she is a lively girl who wears jeans and sneakers, listens to rock music, and dreams of only one thing: buying the beautiful green bicycle that will allow her to race her friend Abdallah. But in the Wahhabi kingdom, bicycles are reserved for men as they pose a threat to young girls’ virtue. Wadjda is therefore denied the necessary amount for this purchase by her mother. Determined to find the money by her own means, Wadjda decides to participate in the Quran recitation contest organized by her school, with the desired amount as the prize for the winner.
*Children from Sarajevo by Aida Begic*
Fiction / Bosnia-Herzegovina / 2012 / 1 hour 30 minutes – Starring Ismir Gagula, Marija Pikic, Velibor Topic
Synopsis: Rahima, 23, and her brother Nedim, 14, are war orphans from Bosnia. They live in Sarajevo, in this transitional society that has lost all compassion for the children of those who died during the city’s siege. After a delinquent adolescence, Rahima found solace in Islam, hoping that Nedim will follow in her footsteps. Everything becomes complicated when, at school, he fights with the son of a powerful minister of the country. This incident triggers a series of events that will lead Rahima to discover her younger brother’s double life…
*Happy Days โ When the Utopia of the Resistance Became Reality by Gilles Perret*
Monday, May 20 at 3:00 pm
Documentary / France / 2012
Synopsis: Imagine today a meeting gathering all political party leaders from both the right and the left, union leaders, and citizen associations who would decide to sign the same political program of insane social, humanistic, and political ambition! A program that would not focus solely on the next electoral deadline but on the next three or four generations. A program that would see the dawn rise for all of humanity. You would tell me: Impossible! And yet, this is what happened between May 1943 and March 1944 on still-occupied French territory. Sixteen men, under the aegis of Jean Moulin, will permanently change France’s face. This program is that of the National Council of Resistance. It was magnificently titled: The Happy Days.
*Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn Bigelow (pending confirmation)*
Monday, May 20 at 6:00 pm
Fiction / USA / 2012 / 2 hours 29 minutes – Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton
Synopsis: The hunt for Osama bin Laden occupied the world and two American presidential administrations for over a decade. But in the end, his capture was due to the resolve and dedication of a small team of CIA agents. Their missions were carried out in secrecy, but some details have since been made public. The most important aspects of the operation, including the central role played by these few men and women, are for the first time portrayed on screen in the new film by Oscar-winning pair Kathryn Bigelow (director and producer) and Mark Boal (screenwriter and producer). Their account of tracking and eliminating bin Laden, both eloquent and faithfully realistic, takes viewers behind the scenes of power and into the heart of the action, detailing this historic mission that will culminate in a special raid on a fortified house in a Pakistani suburb. The attention given to everything that led to this raid distinguishes ZERO DARK THIRTY from other reports of the same events. Hazardous from its inception, the quest to find bin Laden cost several agents their lives. Some intelligence experts came to believe the mission was doomed. But on the ground, a team of analysts and interrogators refused and disproved these predictions. For the first time, their long struggle to locate and neutralize Osama bin Laden is recounted in images in a complex and thrilling film.
*The Invisibles by Sรฉbastien Lifshitz*
Wednesday, May 22 at 3:00 pm
Documentary / French / 2012 / 1 hour 55 minutes
Synopsis: Men and women, born between the wars. They have nothing in common except being homosexual and choosing to live openly, at a time when society rejected them. They loved, fought, desired, made love. Today, they recount what this defiant life was like, torn between the desire to remain like everyone else and the necessity to invent a freedom to thrive. They feared nothing…
*The Queen Of Versailles by Lauren Greenfield*
Wednesday, May 22 at 6:00 pm
Documentary / USA / 2012 / 100 minutes – With Jackie Siegel and David Siegel
Synopsis: Through the portrait of the Siegel family, the director portrays the fallen American dream. He is 74, and she is 43. Jacqueline trained to be an engineer but mostly worked as a model. Miss Florida had everything to seduce David Siegel, the multimillionaire owner of Westgate resorts and a fan of younger women, who said to his wife on the eve of her 40th birthday that he would happily exchange her for two 20-year-old girls! Which makes the wife laugh. “If people don’t want to feel rich,” says David, “they’re probably dead.” With these enlightened words, the man explains that he wanted to build a replica of the Palace of Versailles in California. “Because I could,” he declares. After being charmed by Versailles’ grandeur, the couple decided to build a palace modeled after the French one. But beware, money does not guarantee taste, and despite the tens of millions spent to import marble from China and statues from Europe, their castle rivals more with grotesque plasterboard palaces than with the architecture from Louis XIV’s era. The over-the-top project could not be completed due to the October 2008 stock market crash, which forced David Siegel to sell some of his many resorts, which was not enough to save him from bankruptcy. David refused to part with his Las Vegas tower, leading the family, in a twist of pride, to the brink of bankruptcy, pricing the largest house in America at half-done for a tidy sum of 75 million dollars, which no one could ever afford. The financial impasse of the wealthy owner was one revealed by the economic crisis of 2008, that of the infamous financial system based on speculation.
*There Will Be Blood by Paul-Thomas Anderson*
Thursday, May 23 at 3:00 pm
Fiction / USA / 2008 / 2 hours 38 minutes – With Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier – 7 awards and 27 nominations
Synopsis: When Daniel Plainview hears of a small Californian town where it’s said an ocean of oil literally flows from the ground, he decides to try his luck and moves with his son H.W. to Little Boston. In this remote place where everyone fights to survive, and the only distraction is the church led by the charismatic priest Eli Sunday, Plainview and his son see luck smiling upon them. Even though oil fulfills their expectations and makes their fortune, nothing is as it used to be: tensions intensify, conflicts erupt, and human values like love, hope, community spirit, beliefs, ambition, and even the bonds between father and son are endangered by corruption, betrayal… and oil.
*Eat Sleep Die by Gabriela Pichler*
Friday, May 24 at 3:00 pm
Fiction / Sweden / 2012 / 1 hour 40 minutes – With, Nermina Lukaฤ, Milan Dragiลกiฤ, Jonathan Lampinen, Peter Fรคlt, Ruลพica Pichler
Synopsis: Rasa (non-professional actress Nermina Lukac) is chubby, masculine, always cheerful, and perfectly integrated into her small community. By day, she packs fresh vegetables for a local factory, and by night, she helps her father, whose health increasingly limits his ability to work but with whom she has a serene and playful relationship. When the wave of layoffs begins, Rasa is among the first, perhaps due to her too “Arab-sounding” name. It’s a heavy blow for her, but she remains positive and enrolls in a job-seeking course offered by the unemployment office. To secure a job, she pretends to have a driver’s license, but her lie will be exposed, and she is again dismissed.
*Compliance by Craig Zobel*
Friday, May 24 at 6:00 pm
Fiction / USA / 2012 / 1 hour 30 minutes – With Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy and Bill Camp
Not suitable for children under 12
Synopsis: During a particularly busy day, Sandra, the manager of a fast-food restaurant in an Ohio suburb, receives a call from a policeman accusing one of her employees of stealing from a customer. Believing him, Sandra places Becky under observation, leading them into a situation that will soon overwhelm them all.
*Virgem Margarida by Licinio Azevedo*
Friday, May 24 at 9:00 pm
Fiction / Mozambique / France / Portugal / 2012 / 90 minutes – With: Iva Mugalela, Sumeia Maculuva, Ermelinda Cimela, Rosa Mario, Ana Maria Albino, Ilda Gonzales, Eleuterio Alex
Synopsis: 1975. Mozambique. The revolutionary government is eager to eliminate all traces of colonialism as soon as possible, including prostitution. All city prostitutes are arrested and confined in an isolated camp. There they are reeducated, turned into “new women,” and monitored by female soldiers. Margarida is one of the five hundred prostitutes in the camp. A young 14-year-old countryside girl, she was in the city to buy her trousseau and, finding herself without identification, she was arrested. An unexpected revelation will change her fate: Margarida is a virgin. Not only do the prostitutes adopt her and protect her, but they even begin to idolize her like a saint. Between political film and “prison film” worthy of the best B-movies, Licinio Azevedo proudly upholds the colors of a rare cinematography: Mozambique.
*The Capital by Costa-Gavras*
Saturday, May 25 at 3:00 pm
Fiction / France / 2012 / 1 hour 53 minutes – Starring Gad Elmaleh, Gabriel Byrne, Natacha Rรฉgnier
Synopsis: The resistible rise of a bank lackey in the merciless world of Capital.
*A Little Closer by Matthew Petock*
Sunday, May 26 at 6:00 pm
Fiction / USA / 2012 / 1 hour 12 minutes – With: Sayra Player, Parker Lutz, Eric Baskerville
Synopsis: In a remote Virginia area, Sheryl struggles between her job and raising her two sons, Marc, fifteen, and Stephen, eleven. She dreams of meeting the love of her life and bringing home a father for her children. Meanwhile, Marc longs desperately to lose his virginity. His brother Stephen, experiencing his first sexual awakenings, is in love with the schoolteacher. He also seeks to gain the approval of a group of students who dislike her…
