Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris

One AND Ones…

If there is one tension that runs through the history of cinema—particularly its experimental, militant or “different” forms—it is the tension between personal expression and collective practice: film as a means of expression rooted in a radically singular and situated experience, refusing to let that experience be diluted into a supposed universality; or cinema as a way of creating in common, with the critique of the “auteur” becoming one of the conditions for a different politics of images.

Yet, of course, practices themselves blur this opposition. All personal expression is inseparable from the material conditions and collective struggles that make it possible, and every singular voice bears the traces of the many voices that have shaped it: “I am already a general assembly,” as Judith Butler aptly puts it. Nor does working collectively necessarily mean dissolving individualities into a mass. By redistributing the gestures and functions of the “auteur”, situations can emerge from which radically new forms of expression arise: the “operative group”—that “network of complementary responsibilities” described by Getino and Solanas as early as 1969 in their manifesto Towards a Third Cinema—would be one of the conditions for a genuinely new cinema.

It is this tension that we wish to explore in the Focus programme of the 28th Paris Festival of Different and Experimental Cinemas in 2026. Neither a programme devoted solely to collective practices within experimental and “different” cinemas, nor a celebration of cinema as individual expression. Rather, an attempt to follow the frictions between the two and seek out their sticking points. Hence “One AND Ones…” Perhaps it is also a nod to Godard and his move from the “+” of One + One to the “and” of Here and Elsewhere, made with Miéville. In computing, the “AND” operator requires the terms it connects to be considered together, without necessarily resolving the antagonisms that may exist between them.

Thus, from 9 to 18 October 2026, we will turn our attention to works in which collective or anonymous archives become the material of first-person expression, and to those in which intimate experience is both rooted in chosen or ascribed communities and shaped by institutional forces that extend beyond it. Films and round-table discussions will explore collective forms of organisation, distribution and preservation as the conditions from which singular gestures and voices can emerge and circulate. Audiovisual and expanded-cinema performances will experiment with arrangements of machines, bodies, sounds and images to produce ephemeral shared experiences, while other works will play with the expressive power of layering images, bodies and temporalities. Films, performances and round-table discussions will thus take over numerous venues in Paris and the surrounding area, including several recently opened spaces, many of which are themselves collectively run: Porte 9, L’Anomalie, Le Dynamo, The Wrong Side, AERI, Mains d’Œuvres and Commune Image—to all of whom we extend our warmest thanks for welcoming us!

The International Competition, too, will move to a new venue this year: all six screenings will take place at Cinéma L’Archipel, with the filmmakers in attendance. What will not change, however, is the collective work of the selection committee, which chose 45 films from 28 countries out of nearly 1,700 submissions. Here too, the work must be collective, carefully bringing together each committee member’s distinct sensibilities and cinematic interests in order to shape a selection that is at once eclectic and coherent. As every year, the Jury’s deliberations will be open to the public, making this other form of collective discussion visible. They will take place at Commune Image, which will also host a repeat screening of the award-winning films.

As last year, an Off evening—this time exploring the dialectic between alienation and minority—will be held on Monday 12 October at Un lieu pour respirer in Les Lilas. It is proposed and coordinated by Frédéric Tachou on behalf of Soirées Off FCDEP and by Pierre Merejkowsky on behalf of L’espace de confrontation aliénation minorité.

Finally, the programme also includes a screening for young audiences at the Halle des Épinettes, curated by Pétronille Malet from the CJC catalogue, as well as a programme devoted to filmmakers under the age of 18, at L’Archipel on Saturday 17 October.