Throughout their course at CinéCréatis, students design and carry out a variety of teaching projects designed to develop their artistic, technical and narrative skills. These major projects include the ‘Research & Creation’ module, which can take a variety of forms including documentary, fiction or docu-fiction, a hybrid format combining the codes of fictional narrative and documentary approach.
This ‘Research & Creation’ exercise takes place over a period of two full years, enabling students to explore a subject, a theme or an artistic intention in depth. During the first year, students devote their time to in-depth research, whether theoretical, documentary or fieldwork. This phase also includes formal and narrative experimentation, culminating in a short film. This stage allows them to test different aesthetic approaches and directing devices. The final objective of this first stage is to put together a solid, well-argued creative brief, designed to respond in a relevant and professional manner.
The second year is entirely devoted to putting the project into practice. The students draw on the research, reflections and experiments carried out during the first year to make a new short film, enriched and transformed by this preliminary work. This film is the culmination of the creative process that began at the start of their course.
For the third-year students in particular, the filming and post-production phases of this project took place in February and March. This intense period of creation drew on all the skills acquired during their training.
Divided into working groups, they collaborated closely to design, produce and finalise a series of short films reflecting the diversity of their creative worlds and artistic approaches.
Here’s a sneak preview of the different stories created for this project:
Respire : Music video
Yoni is going through a particularly dark period in his life. He lives alone in a cold, impersonal flat, where every detail seems to reflect his inner state. The place, marked by time and a lack of life, becomes an extension of his malaise. Haunted by memories of a past relationship that refuses to fade, he gradually sinks into his thoughts…
Film: Comedy-drama drama
Jack is dead, but something of him remains. His soul seems to have frozen, imprisoned in an old film camera, a PRAKTICA MTL 3, a vestige of another time. From now on, his gaze merges with that of the viewfinder: he can only see the world through this lens, as if reality itself had become a succession of images to be captured…
Circassians : Documentary film
When we watch a circus show, we are often fascinated by the grace, strength and virtuosity of the performers, without always realising the work that goes into each act, because behind this apparent lightness lie hundreds of hours of training, doubts and failures, but also the need to surpass oneself, to help each other and to pursue a genuine artistic quest. All this commitment is aimed at a single objective: to offer a unique moment, capable of arousing emotion and wonder.
Grey: Fiction
On a derelict industrial wasteland, a small community lives on the fringes of the world, away from the hustle and bustle and out of sight. Among them, Gris, a man in his fifties, shapes his daily life amidst metal sculptures that he patiently assembles, as if to give meaning to the debris that surrounds him.
But a rumour spreads: in the morning, bulldozers will come and raze everything to the ground. Little by little, the inhabitants become worried about the imminent disappearance of their refuge. Gris, however, refuses to flee. As fear takes hold, he continues to collect pieces of metal and sets about erecting a fragile but determined structure in the heart of the ruins. A gesture of resistance, a final attempt to make his voice heard.
Prisme : Fiction
Andréa, a hypersensitive young girl, finds herself in the middle of a party organised by a friend. Very quickly, the intensity of the environment – the noise, the lights, the crowd – becomes overwhelming. Overwhelmed by her surroundings, she loses her footing and gradually allows her emotions to overwhelm her, until she no longer knows how to escape.
Enduro: advertising film
Enduro is a 30-second advertising film featuring a young woman on an intense run, determined to reach the edge of a forest.
Through this progression, the film conveys a powerful idea: with Dromfit, surpassing yourself is born of movement, and the effort is prolonged without ever really stopping.
Red Dot: Fiction
A free party is in full swing. In front of the wall of sound, the crowd dances, carried away by the power of the bass and the collective energy. The atmosphere is electric, almost timeless.
Suddenly, the police burst onto the site and launched a brutal intervention. The party descended into chaos. In the midst of the confusion, a partygoer flees, soon to be pursued by a CRS officer determined to catch up with him.
The chase continues through the forest. Panting and disorientated, the young man desperately tries to escape, but exhaustion finally catches up with him…
Midnight: Fiction
A man flees through a forest plunged into darkness, pursued by a disturbing presence. As he runs, he discovers children’s drawings that seem to revive a buried trauma and guide him towards his inner child.
Together, they plunge into a murky space where memories and fears take shape, until they are brought back to the house of his childhood.
To escape the monsters stalking them, the man will finally have to confront the source of his wound.
Ici Joris : Fiction
Three childhood friends return to the village where they grew up, intent on finding Joris, a former companion whom they have lost touch with for many years. Driven by nostalgia for shared memories, they hope to reconnect with a part of their past.
But their quest soon takes an unexpected turn. In the space of an afternoon, the fantasised reunion gives way to a profound upheaval. Nostalgia gradually gives way to guilt, unspoken words and buried reproaches, forcing each of them to face up brutally to what they had left behind.
Ilex : Fiction
Marin, a young man wandering through a vast expanse of rock, is fleeing from a group of individuals whose haunting presence imposes itself on him like an intrusive thought, impossible to contain. Little by little, this diffuse threat spreads and draws inexorably closer.
In his desperate attempt to escape them, Marin plunges ever deeper into the bowels of the landscape. But far from freeing him, this escape only reinforces his isolation and gradually leads him into a deeper and deeper malaise.
Saumure: dramatic fiction
Early 20th century Brittany. Ethan, a young sailor, is consumed by the death of his wife. Back on land following an accident, he is plagued by nightmarish hallucinations. During dinner with his companions, blood falls into his glass: his reflection reveals a rotten face, and he thinks he sees his wife. The captain takes him straight to an old druid, who offers him purification through tattooing. In the morning, as the trawler prepares to set sail again, Ethan spits out a black, living ink. On the quayside, we can make out the shadow of a woman who has stayed on shore.
Prejudice : Documentary
Police investigator David Cousin looks back at a case that had a profound effect on him: that of a homeless man arrested for voyeurism and rape.
The videos discovered during the investigation confronted the police with an agonising moral dilemma: preserve the victims, or expose them to the truth so that their attacker can be convicted.
At the table: Fiction
Tom grows up in a cannibal family where everything seems normal. Until the day he meets Mila, a future victim. For the first time, doubt sets in. Tom questions his family, his way of life and his own emotions.
Faced with this change of direction, Tom must decide whether to follow the path laid out for him, or find the strength to invent his own.
Crawler : Fiction
What if the results of our Internet searches were collected by humans?
Karl, an overworked office worker, is given a seemingly simple task by his superior: to gather documents quickly. But in a maze of corridors crowded with equally busy employees and in the heart of labyrinthine libraries, his mission takes on a whole new dimension. Very quickly, what seemed like a simple task turns out to be much more complex than expected…
The Passenger: Fiction
Paul, a former alcoholic, is driving alone on a deserted road when he comes across his double, an embodied reflection of his former demons. Disturbed but confident, Paul strikes up a conversation with the man. When they arrive at an isolated bar, the stranger invites him in for a drink to thank him. Paul reluctantly accepts.
In a muggy, unreal atmosphere, he observes this double drinking, seducing and laughing, while he himself struggles inside, as if dispossessed.
Suddenly, his phone rings to wake him from his torpor: his daughter is waiting for him at her dance recital…
The threshold: fiction
Linda is in her kitchen when there’s a knock on the door. In the corridor, Augustin, Marc and Tom introduce themselves as her best friends, but she doesn’t recognise them.
Through the peephole, they try to persuade her to let them in. The exchange escalates and Tom, impatient, suddenly forces open the door. Panicked, Linda rushes into the kitchen and grabs a knife. Augustin slips a photo under the door, showing Linda, the three of them… and a dead friend.
Troubled, she wavers. A dark past resurfaces, turning the evening upside down.
The echo of colours: Fiction
One evening, shortly after 7pm, Albin, 24, hears his neighbour Serena’s music and finds himself painting, as if awoken by an unexpected inspiration.
The music suddenly stops: a neighbour has complained.
Unbeknownst to him, this simple incident is about to trigger an encounter that will turn Albin and Serena’s solitude upside down.
Herons : Fiction clip
Les Hérons is an autobiographical choreographic clip that tells the story of the end of a love affair through movement. Two bodies pass through complicity, then emotional incomprehension, until separation. The break-up is materialised by the birth of a heron, inspired by the actual tattoo belonging to this former relationship.
Through dance, the opening of the wings is made visible by the dress, which unfurls in space. The heron becomes a metaphor for the departure of the loved one. The film ends with the acceptance and rebirth of this relationship.
Empreinte : Observational documentary
WWOOFing is often told as a personal adventure and a quest to return to the land, but here it is approached from a radically new angle: that of the host farmer and his family. Far from the initiatory tale of the traveller, the focus is on the recipients and passers-by. To explore the impact, the joys and the tensions of constantly welcoming strangers into the rural home, in the stillness of winter.
Metrotomy: fiction
On arriving at his older brother’s flat for the first time since his death, Gianni finds among the computer files a piece of music they started together but never finished. So, at a memorial party at his brother’s house, he tells Romain about his problem. Romain, knowing that Gianni can’t make music, immediately agrees to help him. But when they get together in the studio, the music ends up changing drastically, reminding Gianni that his brother was telling him the real point of making this music…
Last canvas: Fiction
Noah Villard is a professor of painting at a university. She’s had no ambition since she stopped being an artist herself. When she learns that one of her students is going to be exhibited in an art gallery, all Noah’s bad memories come flooding back. She turns on this student, Alice, and sets her up as a rival to be destroyed. Alice’s impassivity in the face of her remarks only fuels her anger, until the irreparable happens… Is Noah ready to return to painting, or does she sink even deeper?
What we're looking for up there: contemplative documentary
Surveying the peaks where others lose their way, this documentary paints an intimate portrait of a man who has made these heights his home.
Heir to a line of mountaineers, Raphaël Bozon carries with him the weight of a heritage shaped by the mountains. As a first-aid worker, his routine seems untroubled by the duality of an environment as majestic as it is demanding. Then comes the legacy he chooses to leave: passing on respect for a mountain that you can’t master, but that you learn to listen to.
Dance & shut up : Fiction
In a theatre, a dance casting session takes place under the tense gaze of Frank, a director obsessed with finding the beauty he cannot feel. One audition follows another without arousing the slightest emotion in him, while Victor, a young aspiring film-maker, silently observes the artistic process behind the scenes. Tiredness, tension and technical problems create an increasingly oppressive atmosphere. When a new dancer enters the stage, Frank’s perception goes haywire: the sound seems absent and the movements become intrusive. His unease grows until he is cut off from the rest of the team. Unable to cope with his inner emptiness, he loses control in front of everyone.