Catherine Libert

Catherine Libert
Period: 2011-2012
Profession: Catherine Libert was born in Liège, Belgium, in April 1971. After graduating in film directing at INSAS in Brussels, she shot her first short film “Dans le noir” (In the Dark) under classic 35mm fiction cinema conditions (heavy crew, 35mm finishing, comfortable budget). Despite the warm reception this first film received, she realized that this was not the place for her cinema. She then embarked on a more independent path, making two feature-length documentaries, “Benjamin, portrait d’un départ” and “Nul ne sait ce que peut un corps”. Her cinematic gesture was refined by the ever-increasing need to shoot in lighter conditions, to write the film as it was being shot, to improvise with the actors – in short, to use cinema as a territory for ongoing research, not as an end in itself. She took advantage of the creation of the Brussels lab to learn the techniques of artisanal 16mm and super8 development at the MTK workshops in Grenoble. She went on to make her first feature-length fiction film, “Un été”, with Sébastien Koeppel (who photographed all her early films), shot on Super 8 Kodachrome. She is also involved in the restoration and distribution of Pierre Clémenti’s unreleased films. In 2009, she met Stefano Canapa, who would become her travelling companion on “Chemins de traverse”, a series of documentaries dedicated to independent cinema in Italy. The project took shape, and taking advantage of the fact that the Paris Cinémathèque had given them carte blanche to screen a first portrait of a filmmaker, they quickly shot the first episode of the series, “Les champs brûlants”, on a shoestring budget. Filmed between Rome and Naples and devoted to the cinema of Beppe Gaudino and Isabella Sandri, this first episode was very well received by the public: selected for the Locarno Festival and the Cinéma du réel Festival in Paris, it was also recognized at the Turin Festival 2010, where it received the Special Jury Prize. The Roman project Beyond the chronicle of the death of Italian cinema announced in the late 80s, despite the almost simultaneous disappearance of its greatest filmmakers, beyond a few appearances of works recognized and celebrated at festivals (Gommora, Il Divo, Vincere,…), there are still, from the north to the south of the country, lively and active forces working to continue the history of Italian auteur cinema. A cinema that is as invisible and resilient as the reed against the oak, a cinema that no storm can destroy, because it will always return, free and spontaneous, like the wild grass along the byways. It was with this desire to make visible this cinema of the shadows that the
Chemins de traverse project was born, a series of documentary films across Italy dedicated to independent cinema. Catherine Libert will take advantage of her stay at the Villa Medici to write the next episodes, and to initiate encounters from north to south of the country with filmmakers from different backgrounds, as well as with artists’ collectives, producers, critics, broadcasters, publishers… all working, more or less, for a cinema that is outside the norm, outside the economy, precarious, militant or poetic.