Emmanuel Gras
Emmanuel Gras is a director of documentary-inspired films. His films address social topics and rely on a method of radical formalism. His works are at once experiments on what cinema can produce and how it can address a particular subject. They have been selected to be shown at numerous international festivals such as Vienna International Film Festival, BFI-London, New Directors New Film-New York, TIFF-Toronto, CPH: DOX-Copenhagen, KVIFF-Karlovy Vary, DOKer-Moscow, IDFA-Amsterdam and have won several awards. His first feature film, Bovines, was nominated at the French Césars in 2013 for best documentary, while his most recent work, Makala, won the Critics' Week Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. He was formerly the co-president of ACID (Association for the Distribution of Independent Cinema) and is currently a member of the SRF (Society of Film Directors) in France.
Filming the Gilets Jaunes: How to Express through Cinema the Interior Vibration of a Popular Movement
During his residence at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Emmanuel Gras will edit his new film about the Gilets Jaunes movement and will shape his footage into a testimony of contemporary history. For six months, Gras followed a group that gathered at a roundabout on the outskirts of Chartres, an example of people at the core of the movement. By focusing on the life of the group, filming discussions, meetings, demonstrations in Paris, and observing the laborious structuring of the movement, he wishes to create a film that questions direct democracy, transmission of militant knowledge, resurgence of class consciousness, and the place of the human being and in our society – themes broadly addressed by the Gilets Jaunes themselves.