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Dominique Marchais Presented LA RIVIÈRE, winner of the Jean Vigo Prize 2023, at the 22nd FICM

Berenice Andrade

The winner of the Jean Vigo Award 2023, La Rivière, by French director Dominique Marchais, was presented at the 22nd edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM).

Powerful rivers called “gaves” flow between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic; cornfields leave them thirsty and dams block the flow of salmon. Human activity alters the water cycle and the river's biodiversity. This documentary presents men and women who turn their curious and loving gaze towards this fascinating world, full of beauty and disaster.

During a Q&A session following the screening, Dominique Marchais explained that La Rivière is the continuation of his 2014 documentary, La Ligne de partage des eaux, which explores this manifestation of nature through the omnipresence of water, as a territory and a landscape.

To the question of what can be done to avoid ecological catastrophes resulting from the alteration of the river's biodiversity, the director answered by explaining that his next film is called “What to do?”: “I don't know, I ask myself the same question. In my next film I ask four people who have been involved in political and environmental issues all their lives what to do. What we can do is document, and make the issues visible to good men and women. This film helped the protagonists get to know each other. We must bring the forces that are ignored together.”

On the process of making the film, he elaborated: “Something interesting for me in the practice of documentary filmmaking is the possibility of mixing the writing time, the filming time and the editing time. In terms of the narrative of the film, I thought I was going to make it as if it were upstream and downstream, but after understanding what a river is like, that it flows in all directions, that it flows everywhere, we had to leave behind that archetypal idea of source and estuary.”

The Jean Vigo Award seeks to recognize a director whose short or feature film demonstrates a unique and original style; an independent filmmaker, driven by the love of cinema, like Jean Vigo.