La cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde

“The Nous film project is similar to the Cinémathèque Idéale des Banlieues du Monde, it’s about revisiting dominant images of the suburbs. They are not just a place in flames, full of economic and social problems, a place of violence. Seeing the suburbs as a banal, ordinary place is also political, as they are never seen like that. By documenting people and places in this way, I questioned how these dominant images are produced,” explained Alice Diop, in winter 2021.  

One year prior, the filmmaker launched the creation of the Cinémathèque Idéale des Banlieues du Monde by looking for films that are both poetic and political, committed to telling stories from the suburbs in their full complexity. From Georges Lacombe’s 1929 film La Zone, to the iconic movies L’Amour Existe, by Maurice Pialat in 1960 and 35 Rhums by Claire Denis in 2009, or the recent De Bas Étage by Yassine Qnia, the history of cinema has featured important perspectives on the suburbs from the beginning, despite the fact that many such films have been invisibilised, just like the areas they depict. The Cinémathèque Idéale des Banlieues du Monde released a list of over three hundred films in September 2022, while remaining a non-exhaustive and infinite project.  

Alongside the theatre release of her documentary film Nous, Alice Diop was invited by Centre Pompidou to create a major 4-day cinema event, “Alice Diop, autour de Nous”. She created a kind of impossible self-portrait based on a dozen films from the Cinémathèque Idéale des Banlieues du Monde.   

This monthly event extends the dialogue around fundamental contemporary questions: in the suburbs, where buildings appear and disappear to the beat of human experiences and urban developments, in a cycle that could seem infinite, cinema represents heritage that nowadays must be revealed, saved and shared. This parallel history of cinema is a continuous flow of erasure and disappearances. The challenge is also to question the logic of our fields of meaning, in the critical relationship to works and their reception. What is a filmmaker or a film “from the suburbs”? Which stories fall under this category?  

Each month, the teams and Alice Diop choose and present a film, with the filmmaker in attendance as a guest. They then choose and present a film in turn, for a special screening two weeks later, at Cinéma Saint-André des Arts in Paris.