Privileged place of disclosure for movies directed by women worldwide, it has become with time the only international professional showcase of scale focused on, a long time discriminated and still poorly released, cinéma d’auteur.
The Festival’s stand on a local, national, European cinematographic and international landscape remains essential. Unique open source on the world, the Festival focuses on the special way women apprehend our society, honors them, supports and promotes their various cultures, celebrates actresses, script writers, film editors, cinematographers as well as all other women involved in filmmaking.
During the last 29 years, we have supported women filmmakers, supported their research, and highly praised their innovations, their standpoints, and their commitments.
Women have had to fight against their own censure in order to join such professions. They have had to work double to convince and obtain the means to make their films.
Since its beginning in 1979, the Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil has become one of the most outstanding women’s film festivals. Even today at the threshold of our thirtieth edition, the AFFIF continues to astound by the quality of both the films it presents and the laboratory for expression it has created.
Our Festival which each year brings together over 130 women filmmakers and 20 000 spectators we celebrates their contribution to their innovating stands and apprehension of female representation throughout the 21st century. These women filmmakers make it their priority to explore the outreach of human qualities through both their female and male characters, questioning gender matters in rich, multiple women portraits that respond to our needs of identification according to a range of essential liberating issues.
This year upwards of 200 films from more than two-dozen countries were screened: feature-length and short-length fiction, feature-length and short documentaries, about fifty of which were in competition.
Each year a special place is given to women filmmakers focusing on a specific thematic. Worldwide women filmmakers are invited to show their films and participate in very necessary and thought-provoking forums and debat
Leçons de cinema, Set up, twenty years ago, in fact our filmmaker guests give these “Leçons” They offer us their cinematographic concepts, their experience. They are true life-lessons, poignant testimonies, and historical milestones. Some of the leçons that are being edited:
Safi Faye, Patricia Rozema, Agnès Varda, Helma Sanders Brahms, Vera Chytilova, Caroline Champetier, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Françoise Bonnot, Margarethe Von Trotta, Alanis Obomsawin, Yasmin Ahmad, María Novaro, Tata Amaral, Marcela Fernández Violante, Xiaolu Guo, Mira Nair…
Every year an important actress becomes our guest of honor. She is given the choice of a panel of films that best represents her work. These films are screened during the Festival. There is also a special guest star event with invited personalities as well as local and international press.
Moreover, the Festival is very much committed to its young public and is very proud of its section focused on young people called Graine de Cinéphage, which propose to high-school pupils and collage students a series of workshops on the different trades and jobs within the cinema industry before the Festival in their own class rooms, and during the Festival, a onsite guided tour of our programs as well as the possibility of participating in an inter-college (or high school) jury.
Place of memory, culture and solidarity for the last five years, the Festival has developed a Resource Center Iris, which organizes, labels and inputs all our event’s archives into our database. Making it possible to access all year-round over 6000 films on cassettes and consult many documents focused on the history of cinema and women (an on-line theme catalogue is available for consultation).
International Festival each year during 10 days with a professional filmmaker
Workshops all along the year in several area: cinema at home in the suburbs,
Women’s jail, in high schools and universities, and women’s groups
European Tour with some special program for example with the pioneers
Documentation center
A special program with the Videothèque de Paris or others cinemas in FranceForums
The Festival is a professional, project development and production platform as well as a great laboratory for new ideas. Since its creation, the Festival has not ceased questioning the world around it, its major events. At the center of our programming, we set up forums on transverse topics, which make it possible for all disciplines to meet.
Many issues have and will continue to pass under the Festival’s « microscope »: violence, prostitution, education, women’s history, feminism, sexism, racism, exile, sex, and art… Each time, the filmmakers debate about these issues with specialists in such fields as, social and human sciences journalists, etc. The public is there too to answer, question, and boost the “machine” establishing new standards and new ways of apprehending things.
Today more than yesterday, the Festival is committed to its « testimonial mission ». Thought it, many new ideas, deliberations, reflections have made their way.
Concerned by this need, Jackie Buet, the founder and director of today’s Festival set up, ten years ago, the Leçons de Cinéma. In fact our filmmaker guests give these “lessons”. They offer us their cinematographic concepts, their experience, etc. They are true life-lessons, poignant testimonies, and historical milestones.
In 2005, we were thus able to create a DVD gathering the Asian Women filmmakers. A sample of pure creativeness!
We hope that our web site, that offers free of fee files, founded as an open memory, will allow you to question yourselves as we do, through the backstage of cinema, on women’s stand on history and History itself. Laboratory of ideas, the Festival questions the multiform and complex bonds between, memory and creation.