Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris

Technocriticism: Luddite cinemas

“…and down with all kings but King Ludd!” (Lord Byron)

Against the grinding gears of machine-worlds, the art of sabotage.

It has been suggested that the term ‘sabotage’ comes from the workers of the 19th century who threw their clogs (sabots) into factory machinery, or worked “like clogs” (comme des sabots) - that is, noisily, slowly, awkwardly - to slow down production. Disrupting the machine, or using it differently, to expose its workings and jeopardize its efficiency. 

In this sense, perhaps the first saboteurs were the Luddites, those craftsmen and workers who rose up in early-19th-century England against the introduction of new machines into their factories, often signing their sabotage in the name of the fictitious King Ned Ludd, a mythologized figure of workers’ revolt against automation. The Luddites’ sabotage was not an opposition to technology per se, but a set of strategic refusals, political responses to the way in which these new technologies were being imposed from above, reconfiguring work, bodies, and rights.

One could say that experimental and different cinemas share something of this attitude. They sabotage, like the Luddites: either by dismantling the cinema-machine, or by reinvesting it in other ways, making visible its inner mechanisms and effects. By refusing the automatisms of form. By disobeying the grammar of dominant images. Innovation is not what counts, but what can be unsettled. To sabotage here does not mean to refuse the future. It’s renegotiating its terms.

For technologies are never simply external tools: they shape our environment, our mode of existence. They mold our gestures, distribute our attention, educate our affects, and naturalize forms of power that masquerade as “progress”. They organize the ways we perceive and act. And they do so all the more effectively in that they present themselves as neutral, objective, and inevitable. To sabotage, as the Luddites intuited, is therefore to refuse - at least for the duration of an action - to so docilely adhere to these dominant technological arrangements.

Luddite cinemas of sabotage, then, for this 27th Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, which will take place from October 10 to 19, 2025. Explicitly so in the “Technocriticism” Focus, unfolding through screenings and performances at multiple venues in Paris and the inner suburbs: Cyberrance, DOC, Mains d’Œuvres, AERI, Shakirail and the Grand Action, to whom we extend warm thanks for hosting us during the festival. But also, perhaps more implicitly, in the films selected for this year’s International Competition. This year, the selection committee viewed over 1,700 films and videos - a record. 44 films from 22 countries were selected and will be screened in six sessions at the Grand Action, in the presence of the filmmakers, with a public jury deliberation on Sunday.

After the screening of the award-winning films on Sunday, the closing evening will also pay tribute to Lionel Soukaz, that great saboteur of dominant representations and morals, who passed away at the beginning of 2025, with a new film by Xavier Baert and a projection of a restored double-screen version of Ixe (1980).

An “Off” evening will also be held on Monday, October 13, at the Maltais Rouge, proposed and led by Frédéric Tachou, where anyone can freely bring films to screen and discuss them together - a way of perhaps sabotaging the very principle of selection itself.

Finally, the program also includes a Young Audience screening at the Halle des Épinettes, designed by Pétronille Malet from the CJC catalog, as well as a programme dedicated to filmmakers under 18.