The 45th edition of the Cinémed de Montpellier festival, a tour of the Mediterranean in 200 films

The festival will notably devote a retrospective to the unclassifiable Italian filmmaker Luigi Comencini, who died in 2007, at the age of 90.

The 46th edition of the Cinémed de Montpellier film festival offers from October 18 to 26, 2024 a tour of the Mediterranean in 200 films – including 30 shorts and eight feature films in competition – and a retrospective devoted to Italian filmmaker Luigi Comencini. Twenty-four of the thirty films made by the man who is often presented as the “childhood filmmaker”, who died in 2007 at the age of 90, will be screened there.

She is the daughter of the author of Bread, love and fantasy (1953), The Great Traffic Jam (1973) And The Adventures of Pinocchio (released in France in 1975), director Francesca Comencini, who was chosen for the opening night on October 19, with her film Prima la vita which evokes her youth with this admired father and whose shadow she will seek to emerge from.

The festival will end on Saturday October 26 with the preview of the French film The Mohican by Frédéric Farrucci, who tells in a way “Western Corsican” the fight of a shepherd confronted with the real estate appetites of the local underworld.

Between these two key moments, cinema lovers, cinephiles and the general public alike, will be able to discover 17 feature films in preview, including Louise Violet by Éric Besnard, in the presence of actress Alexandra Lamy, The Thieving Magpie by Robert Guédiguian (also in his presence) or even The Last Breath (with Denis Podalydès and Kad Merad) from Costa-Gavras, whose arrival in Montpellier has been announced.

Actor Reda Kateb, César for best supporting role for Hippocrates (2015) will present his first film as director, On a threadwhich follows the first steps of a street circus artist within a hospital clown association.

The Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher and the Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen are also among the guests. The festival will also focus on the Middle East, including Trip to Gaza by the Italian Piero Usberti, No Other Land, on the meeting of Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, and the short films Vibrations from Gaza (Canada/Palestine)Sarcophagi with drunken loves (France/Lebanon) and This is not the time for pop (Israel).

The situation on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean has “so aggravated” these last twelve months that we “can’t ask” to the filmmakers of “chat now”at least in public, said festival director Christophe Leparc at a press conference on October 1. On the other hand, “the dialogue is not broken during professional meetings”, he pointed out. He also indicated that the selection of films, where the Israeli presence is less than in the past, was only based on criteria of “quality”, and does not in any way constitute a “glare of censorship” driven by political reasons.