Holidays

Are you coming for the holidays?*

Inspired by these timeless French pop songs, the 48^th Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival’s retrospective invites us to embark upon the dual act of leaving and remembering.

Like a summertime refrain, it arouses both the desire of escape and the melancholy of returning, of dreamed landscapes and mirages of idleness. By means of these two promises—that of travel and that of holiday—the Festival explores the multiple representations of time suspended between escape from daily life, search of self, the absurdity of collective rituals, and being confronted with the Other.

In our imaginary, holidays conjure both the escape and the wait, both freedom and constraint, the promise of an idealized elsewhere and, occasionally, the flaring up of personal or social tensions. It is precisely in this zone of contrast that the short film format excels, grasping in just a few minutes the shortcomings, the surprises, and the sparks of truth that surge from these transitory moments.

Such is the case with Broadcast Club’s film Lila, which proposes a bittersweet re-reading of vacation through the prism of teenage nostalgia and that of an ephemeral love story. The film accurately captures the fleeting intensity of summer encounters, moments in which the everyday seems to be suspended. The seaside décor and the late afternoon light suggest a summer that is both real and imaginary, where desire, shyness, and the fear of it all ending are hurled together. Here, vacation is not so much a space to relax, but rather a terrain of emotional initiation in which experience is deeply felt without necessarily lasting. The short film makes this notion palpable: holiday as an awakening of the senses, but also as a scheduled ending.

This retrospective brings together about 20 films, mixing fiction, documentary, and animation from different eras and countries. Films that are light, funny, or contemplative stand alongside darker narratives, wherein holidays become the stage of a suffocating atmosphere, a break-up, or a rite of passage.

The showcased films also interrogate the very notion of vacation: for whom? at what price? with what hopes in mind? Through minimalist or gutsy narratives, the filmmakers in this series paint an unexpected panorama of what it means to “take a break,” whether it is by the seaside, in a trailer, on a suburban balcony, or in the depths of oneself.

Resonating with contemporary cultural practices and social issues, this retrospective adopts an approach that is both cinephilic and popular. It speaks to all generations, proposes a reading at various levels of one universal theme, but is never neutral.

Like always at Clermont-Ferrand, short film here plays its role of a discoverer, of a mirror that exaggerates our habits, our desires, our contradictions. Cinema on Holiday is therefore not only a summer-themed program, it is a way to reexamine, through image, our need to collectively take a deep breath.

And seeing as it is also a question of freedom, let us recall the words of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless:

“If you don’t like the sea, if you don’t like the mountains, if you don’t like the big city, screw you!”

*Title of a French song by the French pop duo David et Jonathan (1988).