Lab Competition

For several years now, documentary film has found a choice place within the Lab competition, with many films garnering awards and selections after their visit to Clermont such as Maalbeek (Special Effects Award and Audience Prize in 2021) or La Mécanique des fluides (The Mechanics of Fluids) by Gala Hernández López (selected in 2023), obtaining the César for Best Short Documentary in 2022 and 2024 respectively; or the films of Pang Chuan Huang, (two-time Grand Prix winner of the Lab Competition) which are regularly selected at the IDFA (the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam), the most important event in the world dedicated to documentaries.

This year’s Lab Competition is no exception to the rule, with documentary proving that it has gained aesthetic autonomy and built an audience. It has freed itself from simple direct cinema, from observation, it has reinvented itself and become a tool of choice for questioning values, conflicts and memory. Alia Haju in her Ship of Fools uses it magnificently, injecting animation to allow her to bear witness, to have her missing image, so hard to obtain, erased by trauma or obscured by official history. We live in a world where the fear of others has reached alarming levels. As if our identity was threatened from the outside, and at the same time weakened from the inside, in crisis. However, the question that is at the heart of documentary film is precisely that of the Other. It is that of humanism. Alia Haju goes toward the Other, the strange Lebanese superman, to team up with him so as to manage to survive in a tormented Beirut.

In documentary film, spectators knows that there is a person behind the camera who invites them, who leads them, who offers to share with them an experience of the world. Xiu Ji Hui Xiang (The Echoes of Rust) plays this role, far from the disinformation often presented in the media and on social media, here we discover a China brutally hit by an economic recession. The eye of Charles Xiuzhi Dong guides us and helps us uncover the uniqueness of this region and of its inhabitants.

Exit Through the Cuckoo’s Nest by Nikola Ilić and Polní Lékař aneb Pravidla Styku s místními e-dívkami (Medical Field Guide or Rules of Engagement with Native E-girls) by Andran Abramjan and Jan Hofman, deal with the question of war and allow us to imagine it in a different manner through cinema, that is to say through filmic devices and within the language of images. They have different approaches: Nikola recounts his life and his refusal to participate in the iniquitous war in Kosovo to the sound of To Live For, his Fugazi-style hardcore punk band. The two Czech directors use the raw and distorted material taken with drones to take spectators into a troubled zone, playing on the plasticity and sensoriality of their images of an unidentified conflict.

But the Lab Competition also means animated film which is making an impressive comeback in the selection: this technique is present in no less than 11 films. And if, like Emil Ferris, you like monsters, you will be delighted: Supersilly with its ultra-sexual Looney Tunes which allow Veronica Martiradonna to explore the origins of her trauma, or Skroll by Dutchman Marten Visser that slips a homage to Miyazaki in the midst of his turbulent and hyper-connected fantastic bestiary. It is a pleasure to see Gianluigi Toccafondo, an outstanding animator with a unique technique, in competition. In La Voix des sirènes, its quasi-human characters, in constant transformation, terrorize their little world. Bunnywood plunges us into the nightmares caused by the lies of parents to their child, it is the brilliant first film of Mansi Maheshwari, a student at the prestigious NFTS (National Film & Television School) in London and who has already won the honors of the Cinéf. The AI ​​monsters are present as well, wandering plagues in this magnificent dystopia by the Italian Andréa Gatopoulos: The Eggregores’ Theory. The final shot will be given by La Fille qui explose (The Exploding Girl), produced by the duo Poggi/Vinel, whose second feature film Eat the Night was until recently still in theaters. Their heroine, scarred and determined, carries within her a cold anger in the face of an era marked by widespread anxiety and loneliness despite of its hyperconnectivity.

Dystopian, connected, furious and curious, welcome to the 2025 Lab Competition.