French director Christophe Loizillon presented his latest film, Ma caméra et moi (2001) during the Pesaro International Film Festival of New Cinema 2003, within the retrospective dedicated to French Avant-Garde Contemporary Cinema.
Inspired by the advent of mini camcorders, the film is about people’s obsession with images. In the beginning, the director wanted the protagonist of the film to be a camera. The idea was to follow it from its being assembled in a factory right through the various uses it was put to. Then, for purely narrative purposes, the screenplay changed in favour of a real life character who begins recording everyday events as a young man and continues doing so for the next thirty years.
As he says in the interview, his film is a low budget film which received financial support from Canal+ and from Acid (the independent film agency set up in 1992 by Loizillon and a number of his fellow directors).
It also received money from the box office advance system, whereby a film receives money in relation to the amount it is expected to drum up at the French box office. Although Ma caméra et moi performed better at festivals than it did on release.

Read the interview

by Federico Greco