Selection committee, Directors’ Fortnight
A cinephile forged in the repertory theatres of Paris’s Latin Quarter, Elsa Charbit fulfilled a lifelong dream when she joined Cinematheque Francaise in 2005, where she spent a decade organising masterclasses and lectures.
“Film history continues to be written today,” says Charbit, whose work with filmmakers led her to “dedicate all [my] energy to the emergence of new voices in cinema”.
That path saw her appointed director of Brive Film Festival, dedicated to mid-length films, in 2015, then artistic director of Festival Entrevues in Belfort from 2019-21. Since 2023, she has been part of the selection committee of Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.
“[Brive and Festival Entrevues] were precious observatories from where to map young independent cinema worldwide,” says Charbit, who believes Directors’ Fortnight should also be a launchpad for young talent and filmmakers from the margins.
Prioritising mise en scène and the singularity of an artist’s gaze, she championed Weston Razooli’s Riddle Of Fire and Pham Thien An’s Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell, among other titles in last year’s Quinzaine selection — debut features she says illustrate the sidebar’s open-mindedness and generosity of spirit. “It is important to make audacious choices, to disrupt,” she says.
This year, Charbit singles out Mongrel from Singapore, East Of Noon from Egypt and To A Land Unknown from Palestine. “The dream is to find films like those, which have left a deep aesthetic mark, shifted our perspectives or even fundamentally changed us.”
Charbit is currently working on the creation of a new US festival in Maine.
Contact: Elsa Charbit
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