OPTIMISTIC COVER at the Collectif Jeune Cinema screening Tue 11 March 2025 16H00—18H00 Université Paris 8 2 rue de la Liberté 93526 SAINT DENIS Projection room A1-181 Building, Saint Denis/ FRANCE

The Collectif Jeune Cinema offers a screening open to all at the Université Paris 8 screening room.

Based on three programs: “La Chimère”, “L’image immolée” and “What’s your flavor?”, the Collectif presents its catalog in all its diversity.

Part 1 – The Chimera or the body in power

Whether it refers to an imaginary creature or simply an illusion, the chimera seems representative of experimental cinema’s ability to redefine the body on screen and grant it new powers and materialities. In this program, the digital alteration of the image and costumed actorial performances situate the films as spaces conducive to the dissection and restructuring of the body. In the background of this Frankensteinian laboratory, various questions are raised about the way in which we consider and inhabit our own bodies, and how these relate to a cosmos in constant metamorphosis.

Hello World/>, Oleksandr Isaienko, 2020, 8’30”, digital/color/sound, Ukraine

Taxidermisez-moi, Marie Losier, 2021, 11’06”, 16mm/digital/color/sound, France

Optimistic Cover, Leyla Rodriguez, 2015, 4’30”, video/digital/color/sound, Argentina

Part 2 – The immolated image

Considered as an alchemical practice, cinema deploys the full extent of its plastic powers by transmuting matter to exalt the primitive forces buried within the image. Through chemical attack on celluloid or digital compression, colors fuse, devouring and dissolving figures in a fiery magma. Chromatic combustion leads to an intense hypnotic experience: the eye burns, the screen ignites, the world is rendered incandescent.

Uishet, Jacques Perconte, 2007, 13’00”, Mini DV/digital/color/ sound, France

Hypnagogia, Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt, 2018, 5’35”, digital/color/sound, Canada

Embers from yesterday, aflame, William Wei Hong-Xiao, 2022, 10’00, digital/NB/Color/sound, UK

Part 3 – What’s Your flavor?

Bodies in perpetual metamorphosis, fragmented identities, desires seeping between pixels. The margins of a forgotten erotic magazine, the drowned reflections of a solitary webcam, the wanderings of a haunted, abstruse “I”: images collide, merge. A transmasc fly brings her lover to orgasm in a dirty bar, while cam2cam sites slowly consume themselves in boredom and sex. Queer presences overlap, fragment and claim their opacity. Everywhere, matter twists and transforms, as do the existences that populate it.

Flyhole, Malic Amalya, 2017, 5’50”, 16mm/digital/NB/sound,USA

CoNEC, Eden Tinto Collins, 2019, 12’00, video/digital/color/sound, France

Face à face dans la nuit, Loic Hobi, 2019, 7’00”, digital/color/sound, France