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As the sun sought slumber behind the Mediterranean in one final, slow-motion plummet, two thick-twanged film critics from North East England sat down to record a chat. There was no script, but their topic was clear: FIDMarseille, France’s most eclectically programmed and well-respected film festival. The idea of a video blog had been posed to Neil Young and myself as far back as February, at this year’s Berlinale. Conflicting schedules and a comically limited knowledge of how these things work prevented this, our first dispatch, from happening sooner.Under its current artistic director Jean-Pierre Rehm, FIDMarseille eschews convention. Now 26 editions old, the weeklong event has no qualms when it comes to programming—often in competition—those medium-length works of an experimental bent that few other festivals seem to touch. As I have written elsewhere, Marseilles itself is a promisingly rough-edged city. For these qualities alone, the fuzzy image...

Malgré la nuit

Director: Philippe Grandrieux // Writer: Philippe Grandrieux

French provocateur Philippe Grandrieux may not be an auteur to everyone’s liking, but since debuting with 1998’s visceral Somber, his cinema has always been a point of contention, and he’s since cultivated a growing cult following that includes names like Marilyn Manson. His most infamous work is the Anna Mougalalis headlined A New Life (2002), which is difficult to find copies of. Since then, titles like 2008’s Un Lac (which is available streaming via boutique site Vyer Films) and 2012’s White Epilepsy have waned in peripheral conversations following their limited festival play. But we are excited to see that Grandrieux wrapped a new project in November, Malgré la nuit (Despite the Night), which should receive a more renowned reception as it’s headlined by Ariane Labed, one of the prominent faces from the Greek Weird Wave (Attenberg; Alps), and one...

White Epilepsy is the latest from the esteemed French visual artist Philippe Grandrieux (Sombre, La Vie Nouvelle, Un Lac).It starts with a back side of an androgynous nude figure in the dark accompanied by the sound of nocturnal insects. The movement of this body mass is slowed down and as it lurches forward and back, it reveals all the nooks and crannies: every vertebrae, every flutter of muscles becomes subtly visible in an eerie muddy visualization that has become the trademark of the French auteur's haptic cinema.While watching this 67 minute film, a sort of primal Adam and Eve story with no dialog, displayed in an inverted format (acting taking place only in a vertical rectangle in the center of the screen- like an iphone...

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