Village of Women directed by Tamara Stepanyan is shown at États généraux du film documentaire - Lussas (Cartes Blanches).
A village where women, children and elderly reside. Men leave 9 months of the year to Russia to work. Summer, a slow and friendly atmosphere; women do the hay, cut the grass and store for the winter. Fruits will be canned to be eaten during the cold winter. The sun arouses a certain laziness, a sensual relaxation. Autumn, with it’s different shades of red, is the season of birth and potato harvest. Women and men find intimacy in the coldness of winter, hence women give birth in October and November. Fathers meet their children in December. Preparations start now to welcome men, waiting is long and tiring. Winter is near, a form of suspense sets in: whose husband will come first ? The men arrive with the snow.
The women are shy, they need time to exist in the presence of men. The children are happy to be close to their fathers. Spring sets in, the atmosphere becomes tensed. Men depart for the land of tsars. She is weak and sad, but needs to find strength to take care of the children.
États généraux du film documentaire
The États Généraux is a non-competitive festival focused on exceptional documentary works, filmographies and the evolution of documentary cinema in a given country.
The Viewing Experiences selection looks into the French-speaking productions of the year, putting forward recent and seldom shown works ; Doc History underlines the educational aspect by showing reference or heritage works ; Doc Route provides an opportunity to review the situation of documentary cinema in one foreign country ; Fragment of a Filmmaker’s Work offers retrospectives of well-established filmmakers of the discovery of young directors' filmographies.
The open-air evening screenings feature films with a more immediate kind of interest.
The festival also offers seminars and workshops (pre-registration required), as well as professional meetings.
Five theaters propose simultaneously screenings in the morning, the afternoon and the evening. At night-time, the open-air screenings, "village" screenings (surrounding villages proposing open-air screenings of the festival's programme on the village main square) and screenings "chez l'habitant" (families hosting a film and its director) are even more occasions to discover the festival's programme.
Finally, the video library is equipped with 40 computers, on which can be viewed the films programmed in the festival's different sections.