Abdellah CHEIKH
Art critic
Director of the ISFF (FIFE)
FIFE is conceived as an annual event that places students’ cinematographic works at the
forefront of its values and priorities.
This festival, unique in its genre, is characterised by a cross-section of young filmmakers,
from all filmic backgrounds, who believe in the contribution of cinema to human
development and in the right to a future and a dream of our image era .
It is a creative platform that eludes all normative classification and provokes as many
questions as answers. It’s a symbolic territory that proposes a new approach to creation
without frontiers, one that innovates and pushes back the boundaries between art and
freedom, while reinforcing dialogue and coexistence.
A platform for events that reflect the sensibilities and moods of the times. It is a
significative field that focuses on the structural and formal aspects of the works, and even
on creative subjectivity.
In short, the ESBA’s ambition is to showcase the students’ films, which are intended to be
a game in the deepest sense of the term, a shared love, a mirror, in other words, a possible
image of the real world in which emotions are observed, dissociated from the immediate
passion that generated them. It is the role of the artist to create this mirror that reflects
the most accurate and complete image of the world possible.
Cinema is a non-judgmental art. It has two values: firstly, it gives pleasure, the pleasure
of curiosity and secondly, it broadens the scope of freedom. Art, in other words, is one of
the great means by which closed communities become open communities. It can lock the
viewer into the voluptuous paralysis of self-contemplation. It can also give the talented
individual the freedom to develop freely and compete for the public’s attention.
Filmmakers are like poets. “They are not the unknown legislators of the world. as the
British poet Shelley famously put it, “they never were, and it is better that they should be
persuaded to be so”, wrote Wystan Hugh Auden in an unpublished text from 1947. He
pondered the limits of freedom and art, their potential and their interaction. Far from the
Romantic vision of art, which gave it more importance than it actually had, this AngloAmerican writer advocated the Shakespearean vision of art, which holds up a mirror to
nature.