Claire Simon
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Trailer Watch: Claire Simon’s Our Body
Watch the trailer for Our Body, the latest from acclaimed French documentarian Claire Simon, director of God’s Offices, The Competition, I Want to Talk About Duras and others. The doc had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale before screening at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight and True/False stateside. Per an official synopsis: French documentary titan Claire Simon observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, she questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity and beauty of patients in all stages of life. Through these many […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jul 13, 2023 -
True/False Film Fest 2021: Unboxing
The box arrived in mid-April while I wasn’t home, so my confused roommates kindly brought it in. “What is this?” one asked when we regrouped; their initial assumption, based on The Box’s shiny black and vaguely sinister appearance, was that our other roommate had ordered bulky apparel from a goth website. Friends described it, variously, as resembling a monolith and/or child’s coffin. This was the first offering from True/False Film Fest 2021’s “Teleported” incarnation, intended as not just another at-home streaming festival but an entire experience—birthed out of pandemic necessity, but hopefully joyous on its own terms. Instead of unlocking the entire […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 4, 2021 -
“A Lot of Stories in France are Not Told”: Claire Simon on The Competition
Claire Simon’s The Competition is a sometimes painfully funny documentary about a subject that doesn’t seem humorous at all: the rigorous admission process, heavy on interviews in front of panels, for La Fémis, one of France’s premiere film schools. Its alumni include Claire Denis and Arnaud Desplechin, and its teachers have included Simon herself. One of France’s premiere documentarians, only with The Competition is Simon finally receiving a US release for her work—it’s the first film to be put out by the newly established Metrograph Pictures. Simon follows the process from beginning to end, with students and their interviewing juries speaking in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 26, 2019 -
IDFA 2018 Presents Industry Talk: Steve James and Claire Simon on Storytelling in Serialized Documentaries
People are “natural scriptwriters,” Claire Simon noted towards the beginning of what turned out to be a surprisingly lively discussion between the French documentarian and the US’s own Steve James about one of the hottest topics in the doc industry today: serialized storytelling. The setting was an intimate theater at De Brakke Grond (the longtime headquarters of IDFA DocLab, where this year’s Humanoid Cookbook theme whimsically allowed for browsing a menu before ordering, or rather requesting, VR experience time slots). The moderator was film programmer Sean Farnel. The two veteran directors opened by acknowledging the biggest difference between feature films […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 24, 2018 -
“Young People More and More Dream of Making Films”: Claire Simon on Le Concours
The French state film school La Fémis is the closest thing to a state-sanctioned religion under the secular French administation. Situated in Paris, it is the French temple of cinema, the film school that has educated more Cannes, Berlin and Venice prizewinners than any other faculty in the world. To go to La Fémis has become a badge of honor; the only trouble is that it’s seemingly impossible to get accepted into it. The entrance exam involves a critical written essay on a film clip, a presentation of a potential film project with research, and a discussion on film during a meeting […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Nov 15, 2016
