Un Film Dramatique. 2019. France. Directed by Éric Baudelaire. DCP. In French, Romanian; English subtitles. 114 min.
Through the creative use of a public art initiative, Éric Baudelaire tasked a group of middle schoolers from Collège Dora Maar in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis to chronicle their lives over the course of four years. The resulting home movies and classroom debates around identity, belonging, representation, and their new tools of filmmaking make up a candid, profound, and often humorous collective portrait. In shaping hundreds of hours of footage, Claire Atherton and Baudelaire approached imagery shot by the students and the proverbial adults in the room (the director’s longtime director of photography, Claire Mathon) with equal measure. This nonhierarchical gesture intertwines a film made by many hands with a singular directorial practice that has long explored authorship, process, and cinematic form. Baudelaire and Atherton’s newest collaboration, Car La Lune, which is featured in the 2026 New York Film Festival, extends this line of inquiry, working with a group of students at Paris’s National Institute for Blind Youth.