Julie Perreard
Friday, June 23, 2023
at 9:00 PM

What contribution can cinema make to the minority languages’ protection?

Conversation with

Julie Perreard, Winner Cinema Prize
Moderated by: Antonello Zanda

Corsican Language

Biography

Julie Perreard, born in 1979 in Ajaccio, Corsica, began her career as an editor after completing a technical qualification. She specializes in editing documentaries and independently produces several films.

In 2010, she trained in Ateliers Varan and directed “Aux Anges” (To the Angels), a tender and incisive movie about her youth in Ajaccio.

In 2012, with the short film “Marcumaria,” language’s theme crept into her cinema for the first time. In “Versi è Tela” (Verses is Canvas), a collection of nine short films in the Corsican language, she refines and asserts her style. Corsica inspires her. It becomes her expressive and experimental terrain.

In 2013, she directed the documentary “Le peuple corse existe, je l’ai vu à la télé” ( Corsican People Exist, I Saw Them on TV). One year later, she discovers the web-documentary genre, creating the 170-minute Corsican episode of “Désobéissance le plus sage des devoirs” (Disobedience, the Wisest Duty), about resistance during the Second World War. With this work, she won the Web Program Festival prize in Paris in 2015.

In 2016, she directed her second short film “Sur la terre nue” (On the Naked Earth), a sensory and erotic journey between land and body, where language emerges as a carrier of desire.

In 2019, she co-directed the documentary “Bisognu di tè” (Need of you) with André Waksman, examining the state of Corsican learning and vitality on the island.

In 2020, she filmed the documentary “Quastana, portrait de campagne(s)” (Quastana, Portrait of Countryside[s]), an intimate, social, political and deeply personal journey which revolves around his almost filial relationship with a politician of Corsica independence.

Among her recent works, we find “Tu n’es pas seule” (You’re not alone), a documentary on sexist and sexual violence; the feature film “Lennie,” a story with focus on gender identity; and “Elle lui et le père Noël” (She, He and Santa Claus), a contemporary “Alice in Wonderland” infused with neorealism.

Motivation for Cinema Prize

The language is like a barometer of human warmth in Julie Perreard’s cinematic work: it’s a sensitivity felt in the immediacy of communication and in the visual storytelling of her films. Thus, in Julie Perreard’s cinematic gaze the language isn’t marginalized, language holds nothing minor because it’s intrinsic to the meaningfulness of images.It’s not taken for granted to handle languages’ sound world for make them travel with the same strength of images. Julie Perreard achieves this by conveying a natural visual grace, leaving nothing hidden from the real world, as it constructs itself as a total tension that reveals the political complexity in Corsican community. The strong connection with the land and the intimate approach that embraces a linguistic bond’s “timelessness” mark a fresh and open style, with great communicative impact.
For these reasons, which elevate the language’s theme to a political and identity-driven level while marking it as an indispensable substrate of a people’s history, Ostana awards its prize to Julie Perreard.

PARTNERS

Atl Cuneo
Fondazione CRT
Fondazione CRC
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Pen Club
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Chambra D'Oc
Stemma Ostana

Comune di Ostana

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The Ostana Prize celebrates the international support received

from the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages, and from two reference institutions in the linguistic field: the ELEN network (European Language Equality Network) and the NPLD network (Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity).

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Stemma Ostana
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