Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

When Yann Legal conceived the project « Childhoods », he suggested we should direct an episode related to the childhood of Jacques Tati. At the outset, a historical film, made in France, was not a natural part of our filmography. We had always worked in the arab world on very personal scripts, inspired by our daily surroundings and often filmed in our own house.

Being part of this project meant we had to face Tati, a history of cinema, discover whether we could work outside our natural context and extent our territory to another geography.

A child, taller than the others, not knowing what to do with his cumbersome body ; a disproportionate body, so abnormal that it turns an assumed handicap into an asset, into a type of resistance to the uniformity which tends to supersede our present world ; a body that seems off-beat in a modern world always seeking more speed, more achievements…

No one ever explored, as Tati did, the disfunction of bodies, the very moment when the well-oiled machine suddenly jams because of a troublemaker, of a foreign body.

Tati centered his cinema on that very body, a cinema often defined as a re-appropriation of the body. It is this re-appropriation we seek.

The emergence of the individual is central to our cinema. When and how does one detach himself from the group and dare to assert one’s difference ?

It is that transformation which interests us, the very instant when things evolve, the passage where Tati himself evolves from « he who is laughed at » to « he with whom we laugh ».

« Open the door, please » is part of a collective film entitled « Childhoods », made up of 6 short films. Each one of them relates an episode of the childhood of a great movie director, and has been directed by a young filmmaker.

SCREENINGS OF CHILDHOODS

• Festival du Film Francophone de Namur (Belgium)
• Hambourg International film festival (Germany)
• Sao Paolo International film festival (Brazil)
• Festival International du Film Molodist (Ukraine)
• Torino International film festival (Italy)
• Festival International du Film d’Amiens (France)
• Festival du Film Méditerranéen de Montpellier (France)
• Festival du Film d’Education d’Evreux (France)
• Mon Premier Festival, AFCAE (France)
• Festival L’Art en bobine de Clermont L’Hérault (France)
• Rencontres cinématographiques des Ecrans de Bretagne (France)
• Forum du Regard de Pessac (France)
• Stockholm International film festival (Sweden)
• Jeonju International film festival (Korea)
• Festival de la Jeunesse de Dole (France)
• Hong-Kong International film festival (China)

SCREENINGS OF OPEN THE DOOR, PLEASE

• Paris Cinéma (France)
• Né à  Beyrouth (Lebanon)
• Capalbio (Italy) Note: The film received a special mention as best film

« Open the door, please » is part of « Court d’aujourd’hui » a program of short films proposed by « Les cahiers du cinema » in several theaters and screenings. The film has been broadcasted on Arte television.

« Open the door, please » will be teach at college in France as part as a program called « Lycéens et apprentis au cinéma de la région centre », a program of « Centre images, Pole régional d’éducation et de formation à l’image » .