Miroir Miroir, ciné-club féministe, la suite

It is often said that cinema is a mirror (of the world, of society, of an era). It can also be a mirror of a director's life, who represents their friends, enemies, daily life, aspirations and struggles in their films. Cinema is, by nature, collaborative : we work in groups, with a team, actors, technicians. And cinema is a mysterious collective experience, watched in a dark room, projected on a big screen, with several strangers or friends, who have come there to see the same thing together. So much for three or four ideas.
Miroir Miroir is a film club that screens a series of heterogeneous films and sometimes hosts guests. The common thread linking all these films is that they were made by female or non-binary directors, who worked very closely and collaboratively with their actors or the subjects of their films, to the point where it can be said that they are collaborations in their own right, between the actresses (subjects or performers) and the filmmakers.
The roles become blurred. The subject and the performer become co-authors of these films. And the films, in turn, blur the lines: they feature female or non-binary characters who escape stereotypes, who refuse ready-made roles, or characters who reappropriate stereotypes, parody them, caricature them, etc. Sometimes these films escape their authors: they do not go exactly in the planned direction, they are in a form of collectivity, of improvisation. It is these working relationships, this complicity, trust and experimentation, this upheaval that we are interested in. This famous ‘mirror work’.
For the year 2025-2026, we will focus on how women artists or non-binary artists are represented by female or non-binary directors, or by collectives (or collective experiences of directing actresses). Whether fictional or real, good or bad artists, musicians, painters, writers, photographers, performers, idle or overwhelmed, these women artists are portrayed in documentaries, musicals, short plays, experimental films, etc.
With Miroir Miroir, we meet for one or two long afternoons a month, from 2pm to 8pm, to watch and discuss films together. It's a film club where we spend time together in the dark, silent, sitting on sofas, watching the same thing at the same time. And it's a film club where, after watching in silence, we talk together about what we've seen, and where, little by little, we build up a gallery of characters, situations, genres and methods.
The sound of the films, the dialogues and our discussions will be our material. We will produce a small fanzine based on our film club: the sounds of the sessions will be archived and used as material to make something, to have a trace, a memory to create together, the other side of the set: the other side of the mirror of Miroir Miroir.