This year, the SIRAR jury will award its 10th prize.

Not to mention the many second prizes. This deserves a small commentary. The town of Aubagne offers a grant, the “Groupe de Recherches et d’Essais Cinématographiques” (film research group) accompanies and produces the film, the Régie Culturelle Régionale (Regional Cultural Control Center) lends its equipment, the students of the SATIS department of the University of Provence bring their brand new skills at each step of the film making, and the students of the CEFEDEM - South play the musical score… Representatives of each structure, helped by the association Meridiens, read the scripts, make an estimation, compose the jury… and start again the next year… This small miracle happens thanks to the will and the quiet assurance of some, convinced they bring to life a place that is a space of freedom, work, training, and reflexion.

These means brought together allow to make films of quality (see the prizes they get), to exist on a small budget indeed, with difficulty, without showing off…but to live. Around the SIRAR, professionals, a manufacturer (Thank you Fujifilm) who gives away film, many friends, generous men and women who, in Aubagne and around, lend their hand in all fields. And this year again, even though the previous festival was but not long ago, we have counted 70 script writer candidates and 15 composer candidates.

All that is very well, but it could be even better… At the Clermont-Ferrand Short Films Festival, the Culture Minister spoke out for setting up subsidies for shorts, depending on the hiring of technicians paid on a regular basis by the producers. Concern among those who have for years supported the creation of fragile first films, able to live only thanks to the volunteer unpaid work of technicians who thus transmit part of their knowledge to the younger generations. If we agree entirely (to say the least) to the principle of paying regular wages to professionals, if we approve of the mesures of tax reduction for producers, we sometimes wonder about the future of these first fims, essential for the beginners, students or not, more and more often self-produced, and which, in this case, should be able to be specifically subsidised. In this matter, the SIRAR leads us to ask the question of the rule of the game for these films which must not, and cannot, disappear through a well-meaning reform whose effects would be paradoxical.

To be continued next year ?

Creation date : 23/02/2006 : 12:42
Last update : 29/03/2006 : 13:32
Category : SiRAR

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