Vincent Dieutre

A studio. A man and a woman. Moving images on the screen, which he comments on, spurred on by her questions. All the footage was shot from the window of a flat: views of the street, the metro line running above it, the canal, into the windows of the buildings opposite. The flat belongs to the man’s lover, the man is a guest, spending his nights there but never his days. By the canal, young men from Afghanistan set up makeshift shelters as the man looks on, developing increasing sympathy for them. The seasons change, winter, spring, summer.

Chronicles of a male homosexual drug addict in 1980's in voice-over with long take scenes from Rome, television snippets of news of Gulf War and commercials.

A couple travels to Italy. During their trip, the state of their relationship becomes clear to them: They argue, take different paths and wonder whether to divorce. Vincent Dieutre has remade Viaggio in Italia and adapted it to his own life. Alex and Kate have become Alex and Tom, played by Vincent himself and his partner Simon. This new couple goes to the same places, experiences similar things, but their time in Naples is inevitably not the same. The city has changed, as has the nature of relationships, tourism has become more digital. As the two become increasingly alienated, Vincent the filmmaker moves through the city with his camera. He talks about how Rossellini’s film shaped him. We hear his thoughts about a remake, notes to himself, his discussions with a copyright lawyer. In Vincent and Simon’s world, much like that of Tom and Alex, the procession of the final scene gives way to a football match. What was still sacred back then becomes a riot here.

“My best friend, Anna, asked me if I would mind taking her fifteen-year-old son Itvan to Berlin with me. I accepted immediately.” An elegant, refined man in his forties sets off with Itvan on a long, enjoyable journey, his Winter Journey. They cross snowbound Germany by car. As the man drives the boy through cities and countryside, Itvan discovers the past and the vast job of reunification now underway. Poetry and culture are also part of the journey, which is accompanied by classical German music. When their paths cross with the man's former lovers or the journey provides unexpected encounters, Itvan also gets to know more about the man's own life. When they finally arrive in Berlin, their ways must part. Itvan watches the man leave, taking the melancholy of his existence with him. However their journey together has created an unbreakable tie between the two men. Itvan will never be the same again.

Road trips through Los Angeles, famous verses in the Poetry Lounge and love in times of the pandemic: Rendezvous with an old flame, fourty years later. After Jaurès (2012), Vincent Dieutre presents another tender autofictional piece in the Forum.

“The Nineties had a pretty bad start”, this is how Vincent Dieutre introduces us to the shadows of his personal universe in those years going through Utrecht, Naples and Rome. In these three cities and two love affairs guide a homosexual man on his nightly search for lost beauty. In a cross between a diary and a baroque play the film reconstructs the fragments of a fateful journey against a Caravaggio backdrop. Painting, sensuality, losing oneself in a cityscape: the Leçons de ténèbres form an obscure fresco, a white-hot collage of trashy vanity.

A shadow in the woods, a sunny summer afternoon. Antoine and Philippe part without saying goodbye. That same day, a blond girl writes their names on a window of her house. Her mission is to heal other people’s wounds, help lost lovers to forget or disappear.

At the end of June in Paris: Mireille accompanies his friend Thomas, a solitary and restless being, during a walk to Père Lachaise. Thomas is very agitated, worried. He confides to Mireille that he wishes to be cremated in the event of death. In September: after a period of holidays, Mireille returns at her home. She and his friends do not any more manage to contact Thomas. After investigation, Mireille learns that Thomas died in August, only. As he has no family his body was interred in the square of the needy of the new cemetery of Thiais. Mireille wants to honor the last wills of his friend, but the law is strict: to dig up the body and cremate it, the services of the city hall have to have the signature of a member of Thomas's family. Mireille learns that Thomas had a younger brother, Melchior. But But the young man, marginalized, abandoned for years by his older brother, refuses to sign the licence to dig up.

A journey into contemporary French cinema through a series of exclusive interviews with the leading figures of GLBT French cinematography: André Téchiné, Catherine Corsini, Gaël Morel, Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau and other old acquaintances of our film festival. This documentary offers an interesting insight into the official and non-official cinema from the point of view of gender identity. A look behind the scenes: discussing issues like censorship and self-censorship, women' cinema and misogyny, transvestism and homo-eroticism, cinema d'auteur and popular cinema (was the Nouvelle Vague homophobic?). From past to present, from Jacques Demy to François Ozon.

A young woman travels to Moscow, speaking with the people she meets of the region's recent past.

Stalingrad Lovers

A young woman begins a new life at the Apollonide bordello, a high-class brothel in Paris at the turn of the 20th century.