40X15

The Directors’ Fortnight was born in the wake of May ‘68, the initiative of a group of directors who had decided to join forces to create the Société des Réalisateurs de Films. Designed to counter the academism of the main selection of the Cannes Film Festival, the Fortnight quickly found its mark with a selection of films by innovative, previously ignored directors. The film recounts the eventful history of this Cannes sidebar, as told by Pierre-Henri Deleau, its artistic director until 1998, then by his successors, in particular Olivier Père, whom we follow behind the scenes as he prepares the Fortnight’s 2007 edition. Interwoven with interviews with more than two dozen major directors, archive footage and film clips, the documentary pays tribute to this independent, still somewhat rebellious event and charts the evolution of cinéphilie over the past 40 years. With the testimonies of : Todd Haynes, Jacques Rozier, Costa Gavras, Michael Raeburn, Ken Loach, Alain Tanner, Carlos Diegues, Werner Herzog, Theo Angelopoulos, André Téchiné, Chantal Akerman, Paolo et Vittorio Taviani, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Yousry Nasrallah, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, Peter Sellars, Naomi Kawase, Manoel de Oliveira, Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Stephen Frears, Sofia Coppola, Eric Khoo, Kim Rossi Stuart, Lisandro Alonso, Christophe Honoré, Bong Joon-Ho, William Friedkin, Jacques Nolot.