The Lama Festival in Corsica, the most beautiful setting for a screen

From Saturday July 27 to Friday August 2, the film festival celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, and several new films acclaimed by critics at Cannes will be shown in the usual conditions: outdoors and under the stars at nightfall, surrounded by the mountains of Haute-Corse.

Lama is first of all a magnificent village a little hidden in the heights, halfway between Corte and the beaches of Balagne, in Haute-Corse. That is to say no more than 150 inhabitants per year, but a real effervescence every summer since 1994. It must be said that seeing films in Lama is first of all a unique experience: “A magical place, tells us Marie-Flora Sammarcelli, president and co-programmer of the festival, with screenings of exceptional quality, we are also one of the first festivals to have gone digital after Cannes. And films where we can meet the whole world: the subtitle of the festival is ‘Chronicle of a world village’. So it is both the village, with all its richness, all the beauty of rurality, and the wonder of the screenings.”

On the menu this year, we find several films acclaimed by critics at the last Cannes Film Festival: in bulk, those directed by the Larrieu brothers, the Romanian Emmanuel Parvu, the Indian Asaf Kapadia or the Spaniard Jonas Trueba. And two others, also noted, but with the particularity of being directed by Corsicans: As his look by Thierry De Peretti and The kingdom by Julien Colonna. A mixture of quality and eclecticism, from Corsica and elsewhere, which makes the festival president particularly proud: “That’s precisely what we want to do, an eclectic program. We don’t deny ourselves anything, we don’t forbid ourselves anything, we loved the films seen in Cannes by our programmers, we defended them, we had real favorites. But also the films made by Corsicans, in fact they are the ones who saw the ticket sales go up the fastest, we feel a real impatience, they are highly anticipated. These are also sometimes difficult choices, because as we have to wait until nightfall to screen outdoors, we have little time, in total this year we can count on fourteen feature films, and six others for children.”

“It’s my village, I was born there, so it makes me particularly proud!”

Marie-Flora Sammarcelli, president of the Lama film festival, in Corsica

to franceinfo

“And I think we also managed to make our contribution, particularly for Corsican films. I still remember Thierry De Peretti, who is now on his fourth feature film, each time acclaimed by the press and the public, who was feverish before presenting his short film here at the time. So I tell myself that perhaps we inspired vocations and allowed Corsican cinema to produce magnificent films.”

From Saturday to Friday, August 2, we will once again be able to enjoy cinema under the stars, and if by bad luck it rains, perhaps you will end up debating the seventh art in the village church, like with Jacques Weber and his film Don Juan in the late 90s.