Year 2026-2027: BUILDING CHARACTERS IN FILM

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Last year

Editorial

The CCAJ is tackling a new topic in cinema that also resonates with a social issue: that of the character. China will participate for the first time, alongside 11 other countries and 7 regions in France. 

What is a main character, a supporting character, or a background figure, and how are they developed in film? How do you bring a character to life from the person you are filming? These are just some of the questions that will be explored this fall during an international training session bringing together film educators and practitioners involved in the CCAJ workshops. Led by Alain Bergala, in collaboration with Elise Tamisier and Bartlomiej Woznica, and with the support of Sophie Letourneur, this training session will kick off a year of workshops, at the end of which all the films shot by the students (aged 7 to 18) will be screened in their presence.

This 32nd edition of the program will be organized by the DFF - Deutsches Filminstitut and Filmmuseum (Frankfurt), the CCAJ! association (Paris), and the Cie d'Avril (Martigues), in partnership with Le Luxy cinema (Ivry-sur-Seine), and with a network of coordinators (film archives, movie theaters, and associations) around the world.

Focus

Building Characters in Film

Person - Character - Actor.

Cinema This year will be dedicated to the theme of the film character. The 'character' is an imaginary being depicted in a noval, a painting, a film, a comic book... Our approach will explore: the person (as they are in 'real life' or in a documentary film), the character (in fiction), and the actor (who plays a character). In 'real life', certain people take on a 'role' in social life, whether male or female: the teacher, the politician, the police officer, the doctor, etc. Social media today plays an essential role in the creation of semi-fictional characters as doubles of internet users.

In cinema, the construction of a character involves: 

• The screenplay: how the character is shaped by the screenplay (through a name, social connections, relationships with others, personnality, emotions, etc.)
• The social setting, costumes, language, and signs of the era
• The direction
• The actor: their physical appearance and performance.

To explore the construction of characters in cinema, we will examine how the actor-character relationship has evolved historically, through various transformations, throughout the history of cinema.

Alain Bergala