Paris Festival of Different and Experimental Cinemas

The 28th edition of the Paris Festival of Different and Experimental Cinemas will take place from October 9th to 18th, 2026! For this edition, 45 films from 28 countries will be presented in international competition alongside a FOCUS program titled "One AND Ones…", questioning the tensions between the personal and the collective in experimental filmmaking, as well as three sessions for young audiences.

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One AND Ones…

If there is one tension that runs through the history of cinema, especially in its experimental, militant, or "different" forms, it is the one that opposes personal expression to collective practices: film as a way of expressing oneself from a radically singular and situated experience, refusing its dilution into a supposed universality, or cinema as a way of sharing, with the critique of "the author" then becoming one of the conditions for a different politics of images.

But of course, the practices themselves blur this opposition. All personal expression is inseparable from the material conditions and collective struggles that make it possible, and every singular voice carries the trace of the multiplicity of voices that composed it: "I am already a general assembly," as Judith Butler aptly puts it. And working collectively does not necessarily mean dissolving individualities into a mass; it is by redistributing the gestures and functions of "the author" that situations can emerge from which radically new expressions are born: the "operative group," that "network of complementary responsibilities" already described by Getino and Solanas in 1969 in their manifesto "Towards a Third Cinema," would be one of the conditions for a truly new cinema.

It is this tension that we wish to explore in the Focus of this 28th Festival of Different and Experimental Cinemas in 2026. Neither a program devoted solely to the collective practices of experimental and different cinemas, nor a celebration of cinema as individual expression. Rather, we want to follow its frictions and look for points of contention. Hence "One AND Ones." A way, perhaps, to nod to Godard and his transition from the "+" of One + One to the "and" of Here and Elsewhere made with Miéville. In computer language, the "AND" operator requires that the terms it articulates be thought of together, without their potential antagonisms being resolved.

Thus, from October 9 to 18, 2026, we will be interested in works where collective or anonymous archives become the material for first-person speech, and in those where intimate experience is both anchored in chosen or assigned communities and traversed by institutional issues that go beyond it. Films and round tables will explore modes of collective organization, distribution, and conservation as the conditions from which singular gestures and voices can arise and circulate. Audiovisual and expanded cinema performances will experiment with the arrangement of machines, bodies, sounds, and images as an ephemeral production of common experiences, while other works will play with the powers of superimposing images, bodies, and temporalities. Films, performances, and round tables will take over multiple venues in Paris and its surroundings, including several newly opened spaces, many of which are themselves managed collectively: ART_L, l’Anomalie, la Dynamo, The Wrong Side, l’AERI, Mains d’œuvre, Commune Image (we thank them warmly for their welcome!).

The International Competition will also be in a new venue this year: the six sessions will be screened at the l’Archipel cinema, in the presence of the filmmakers. What does not change, however, is the collective work of the selection committee, which selected 45 films from 28 different countries out of nearly 1700 submitted films. Here too, we must work collectively, taking care to articulate the unique cinematic sensibilities and interests of each committee member to bring out a selection that is both eclectic and coherent. The Jury's deliberation, public as every year, to make these other collective discussions visible, will take place at Commune Image, as will the screening of the award-winning films.

As last year, an "Off" evening, this time questioning the alienation-minority dialectic, will be held on Monday, October 12th at Un lieu pour respirer, in Les Lilas, proposed and coordinated by Frédéric Tachou on behalf of Soirées Off FCDEP and by Pierre Merejkowsky on behalf of L’espace de confrontation aliénation minorité.

Finally, the program also includes a Young Audience session at the Halle des Épinettes, designed by Pétronille Malet from the CJC catalog, which will be repeated on Sunday, October 18th at Commune Image (followed by a Young Audience workshop), as well as a program dedicated to filmmakers under 18 at l’Archipel on Saturday, October 17th.