Thierry Lounas is the editorial director of the monthly review So Film as well as a producer and distributor. Excessively active, he sees his commitment to cinema as multi-faceted; for over a decade, his magazine has been giving a voice to singular points of view with a highly narrative and playful approach, both to current and heritage films. At the company Capricci, he has also produced, distributed (and at times even co-written!) films by Abel Ferrara, Albert Serra or Jean-Charles Hue. He declared in 2016, "I want to create a space that enables talents to emerge. We need to deconstruct 'auteur cinema' in order to better reconstruct it in the spirit of Roger Corman, with a strong B-series vibe, making shooting more creative and less of a burden”. To this point, he has created residencies for artists specialising in genre cinema; a prime example is Just Philippot’s film, The Swarm, which he both produced and distributed.
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The Bernard Chardère Prize
The first Bernard Chardère Prize was awarded to journalist and producer Jean-Jacques Bernard, a loyal presence at the Lumière festival since its inception. He gave his time generously, whether it was on the set of Radio Lumière or hosting festival guests. The prize was subsequently presented to Serge Kaganski (Les Inrockuptibles), Danièle Heymann (Marianne, Le Masque et la Plume- radio program on France Inter), Freddy Buache, founder of the Swiss Film Library, writer, historian. The prize was also conferred upon renown cinema critic Michel Ciment, editor of Positif, Eva Bettan, radio journalist and eloquent voice of France Inter, Lucien Logette, managing editor of Jeune Cinéma, Luc Lagier, creator of Arte's program Blow Up, and journalists and film critics Laurent Delmas and Christine Masson for their radio show ‘On aura tout vu’ on France Inter.
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Bernard Chardère
As a young graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, he founded the magazine Positif in Lyon in 1952. Bernard Chardère had surrounded himself with a group of cinema enthusiasts and critics, who were influenced by surrealism and progressivism, thereby giving birth to one of the most pivotal magazines of the film world. In 1958 he launched a collection of monographs on filmmakers, ‘Premier Plan’. Twenty years later, he served as general delegate of the Fondation nationale de la photographie, and in 1982, he became the first director of the Lumière Institute, while pursuing a rich career as an author, publishing several reference works on the Lumière brothers, French cinema dialogues or Jacques Prévert.
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