The Oldenburg Film Festival has picked two iconoclast filmmakers to honor for its 30th anniversary edition: French actor/director Isild Le Besco and Canadian producer Jen Gatien. Both women have carved out unique paths in independent cinema, defying conventions and expectations.
Le Besco has worked in front of the camera since she was eight, and by her early 20s was already a face of French auteur cinema, with two César nominations — for her performances in Benoît Jacquot’s Sade (2000) and Cédric Kahn’s Roberto Succo (2001) and a best actress honor in Venice for Jacquot’s L’Intouchable (2006).
Her directorial debut, 2004’s Demi-Tarif (Half-Price), the story of three young siblings, Romeo (Kolia Litscher), Launa (Lila Salet), and the youngest, Leo (Cindy David), left on their own in a rundown Paris apartment, was an unmediated look into the world of childhood and drew praise from the likes of Mia Hansen-Løve, whose review, in Cahiers du Cinema, singled out Le Besco’s instinct to use movies not “to tell stories but just [to] capture them with her camera.” A radical example of lo-fi, DIY cinema, the film is shot entirely on hand-held digital cameras and presented like found footage, with no subtitled dialogue and only Le Besco’s own narration dubbed over the video.
Le Besco continued to explore the worlds of youth with her second feature, Charly, the story of Nicolas (Kolia Litscher), an adolescent boy on the run whose encounter with the slightly older prostitute Charly (Julie-Marie Parmentier) transforms his life.
By her third movie, Bas-Fonds, Le Besco had established herself as, in the words of one New York Times headline, the “wild child of French cinema.” The movie, about three young women shacking up in a rancid hovel in the French provinces, premiered in Locarno and screened at the Oldenburg film festival in 2010.
The trilogy — Demi-Tarif, Charly and Bas-Fonds — also demonstrated Le Besco’s unique perspective on the kingdom of childhood, her approach of depicting, rather than explaining, the struggles and longings of young characters, her exploration of the beauty and fragility of childhood, an exploration that continues in more recent films, such as 2017’s La belle occasion, which focuses on two young siblings living with a circus and their chance encounter with a young girl.
Few producers could be properly called auteurs, but the career of Jen Gatien has followed the path of the movie maverick: supporting films that amplify new voices and push the boundaries of the medium.
Gatien can be credited with helping to discover Jesse Eisenberg, whose breakthrough role came in the Gatien-produced Holy Rollers (2010), and director Xan Cassavetes, daughter of John Cassavetes, producing her debut feature, Kiss of the Damned (2012), which premiered in Venice. When Deborah Kampmeier’s 2007 feature Hounddog, starring a young Dakota Fanning, came under attack for its depiction of sexual themes involving young teens, producer Gatien defended the film’s artistic merit against calls for a ban on the movie.
Gatien has been at least as influential in the documentary space, backing Chelsea on the Rocks (2008), a doc on New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel, from legendary New York director Abel Ferrara; Limelight, Billy Corben’s 2011 documentary on the iconic Limelight club in Manhattan, owned by Gatien’s father Peter Gatien; and, together with Spike Lee, Darius Clark Monroe’s Evolution of a Criminal (2014), in which the director, convicted of a bank robbery in his teens, returns home to examine how his actions affected the lives of his family, friends and his victims.
To honor both women, Oldenburg will be screening a selection of their films as part of the 2023 tribute celebrations. The program will feature Le Besco’s Demi-Tarif, Charly, Bas-Fonds and La belle occasion, as well as Gatien-produced Chelsea on the Rocks and the 2015 feature Dixieland, directed by Hank Bedford and starring Riley Keough, Chris Zylka, Faith Hill, and RJ Mitte.
The 2023 Oldenburg Film Festival opened on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 17.
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