Claude Duty
Saturday, September 6 at 10:30am
I’ve been lucky enough to be “President for Life” of the Off-Courts festival for several years now! It’s an exceptional, rare and unexpected status, and believe me, I’m very honored and flattered. The only drawback to this wonderful privilege is that, as a filmmaker, it deprives me of presenting my films in competition… A tough frustration for a filmmaker! But it’s a rule that everyone can easily understand.
Yet this year, for this 26ᵉ edition, the Festival is offering me a wonderful gift: a carte blanche in which I have hastened to program three of my recent short films, each shot six years apart. In imagining them, I drew inspiration from the places and people who inhabit them, blending fiction with personal memories, which ultimately resulted in a bittersweet trilogy, full of little winks that ricochet from film to film, where humor is never far away…
So here I am, a fulfilled president, all the more so as this screening, scheduled to open the festival at 10.30 a.m. on Saturday September 6, will gently introduce us to the friendly, cheerful and inimitable Off-Courts atmosphere… because we’ve got a long, hectic week ahead of us!
-Claude DUTY
