Near Perpignan, the Ciné-Rencontres de Prades are celebrating their 62 edition

The international film festival of Prades (Pyrenees-Orientales) consists of eight days of screenings, meetings and debates, organized by the Ciné-Rencontres association. After Cannes, it is one of the oldest film festivals in France. Over the years, it has established itself as a festival honoring independent and auteur cinema.

For this 62nd edition, which takes place from July 15 to 22, the two guest filmmakers are Michel Leclerc (The Name of People, The Class Struggle) and Alice Winocour (Proxima, See Paris again).

The festival is also an opportunity to award the Solveig Anspach Prize. This prize, awarded by the public, rewards one of the eight European feature films in competition (first or second film). A short film competition and a meeting with director Valérie Leroy are also scheduled.

Meeting with director Alice Winocour

During the festival, director Alice Winocour presented her fourth opus See Paris again, a film about the experiences of the survivors of the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. ” My little brother was in the Bataclan attack and luckily he survived. I didn’t want to make a film about the constitution of events but about a journey of resilience and reconstruction of a woman who was caught in a terrorist attack“, explains the filmmaker.

Programming is the initiative of a whole team of volunteers whose goal is to promote exchange and debate between filmmakers and the public. “That’s what’s essential, it’s to create this link, this search to see interesting films, to discover new modes of expression, new authors. This is what makes Prades so rich“, estimates Jean-Pierre Abizanda, artistic director of the Ciné-Rencontres. And to close the festival, during the last evening, this Saturday, July 22, will be awarded the public prize Solveig Anspach.