NEWS 06/10/06 MARCELINE LORIDAN VISITS DOCÚPOLIS 06 The main character of Chronique d’un eté, documentary that in 1959 created “cinema-verité”, will be present at the Documentary Film Festival of Barcelona to participat in the round table about Joris Ivens. The audience of Chronique d’un eté couldn’t forget a young curly haired woman who in the summer of 1959 talked to the few parisins were still in the city, with a microphone in her hands, to ask them with a happy and emphatic voice: “Are you happy?”. They didn’t forget either the same young woman that in the master film by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin made a long monologue about her experiences in Auschwitz, while the camera that was following her through the streets of Paris with a travelling that was moving away from her till the presence of Marceline in the screen was reduced to a little point in the middle of an empty train station. This Friday, Marceline Loridan, the star of one of the movies and one of the shots more memorable of the history of the cinema, will visit Barcelona to assist at the round table and pick up the Honorific Award that the Festival gives to her husband, the disappeared Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Marceline Loridan Ivens was member of the French Resistance when she was 17 years old and the same year she was arrested in Bollène (France) and deported to the Birkenau concentration camp. After her liberation, the meeting with Jean Rouch to participate as assistant and principal actress of the film that would cause the Cinema-verité or direct cinema is the beginning of an intense dedication to the documentary cinema. A part from working as a filmmaker for the French television, in 1962 co-directed a movie about the Argelian War, Argélie Année Zéro. The following year she met with the great documentalist Joris Ivens, who became her husband and cinematographic colleague. Together, they firm numerous documentaries that register the key socio-political events of these years: Cuba, Vietnam, and especially China, country that had a tight relationship with the couple. In 1998 is released in the Festival of Venice the last movie of Ivens and Loridan, and one of the most personal: Une histoire du vent (that will be projected in the Retrospective of Docúpolis on Sunday 8th October at 18h00 together with a rarity: the first movie realized by Joris Ivens, when he was 13 years old, a domestic western). From 1993 Marceline Loridan is president of the Friends of Joris Ivens Association that afterwards became the European Foundation Joris Ivens. In 2003 she came back to Birkenau to realize her first film alone, the autobiographic fiction La petite prairie aux bouleaux. During the round table (there will be also the presence of André Stufkens -Director of the European Foundation Joris IVens and Josetxo Cerdán -cinema lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona-, and the table will be on Friday 6th October at the Hall of the Contemporanean Culture Centre of Barcelona, CCCB, at 20h) Marceline Loridan will pick up the Honorific Award El hombre de la cámara that Docúpolis gives to the Dutch filmmaker for his all career and it will consist in a portrait-collage of Ivens made by the artist Fernando Alday.
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