YA FRANÇA, YA FRANÇA

Liberating monologue, anti-colonial tale, cry of rage and resistance, political cine-poem, accusatory collage, sociological portrait, feminist manifesto, guerrillafilm choral* or anti-racist comedy, the films of the YA FRANÇA, YA FRANÇA** program explore the political tensions in France from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a time marked by postcolonial racist crimes and struggles against “colonialism at home”***. 

Films that are too rarely shown - and this despite the strength of their vision, their formal inventiveness and the rigor of their political intentions - together pose an assertive and liberated view of society, offering an aesthetics and an internalized language that rids itself of dominant cinematographic codes.

This series brings together filmmakers who affirm the power of displacement, struggle, tumult, diversion, cunning, refusal and piracy, contrary to dominant discourses. “We must”, as Touati from the Mohamed collective proclaims, “accelerate the process of reappropriation”. 

Whether reappropriating popular genres like comedy or amateur formats such as Super 8, borrowing from the aesthetics of militant cine-tracts or the tools of experimental cinema, encouraging struggle yet refusing both heroism and misery, the myriad paths taken by these filmmakers try, through the cinematographic gesture, to awaken a desire for transformation, one buried by the repetition of historical violence and the intersection of oppressions.

*A film genre that features multiple characters whose destinies are intertwined.
**Ya França! Ya frança borrows its title from the film by Rabia Teguia (1980).
***Colonialism at home is a formula by Révolution Afrique militant and filmmaker Madeleine Beauséjour. 

Léa Morin is a film curator and researcher committed to the preservation, restoration and circulation of archives of films that stand against authoritarian narratives and models (colonial, state, capitalist, patriarchal). She is active in several collectives, including the Bouanani Archives: A History of Cinema in Morocco (Rabat), Talitha, an association engaged in the re-circulation of experimental cinematic and sound archives (Rennes), the editorial project Intilak (with Maya Ouabadi and Touda Bouanani) and as member of the Research Department of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian).

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds