Cinéma du Réel is 30 years old
Since 1978, the Cinéma du Réel international documentary film festival has been an outstanding international meeting point, where the public and professionals discover the films of experienced authors as well as new talents, the history of documentary cinema as well as contemporary works. The festival programs some hundred films for its various sections, screened at the Centre Pompidou, the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, the MK2 Beaubourg film theatre, the Paris City Hall and several other theatres in the Ile-de- France area.

International Competition and French Competition
Some 50 French and international premieres, as well as encounters and discussions with the filmmakers.

Retrospectives and Special Programmes

Americana 67-72: Something's Happening Here…
A selection of films where commitment and the driving forces of socio-political movements (against the Vietnam war, for Black empowerment or… for a different way of life) are translated into cinematographic vitality, narrative inventiveness, reinventions of documentary and fiction. The programme includes tributes to Shirley Clarke and Jim McBride.

In South-East Asia
From Kuala Lumpur to Manila, from Bangkok to Jakarta, documentary films lend images and sounds to long-buried stories, as witnessed by the works of filmmakers such as Garin Nugroho, Amir Muhammad, Raya Martin. The programme includes a tribute to Lav Diaz, the great Filipino poet of cinema, whose powerful films blend documentary and fiction into a lyrical experience.

The Theatre of Reality
In line with the first "theatre" event in 2005 with Frederick Wiseman, cinema and theatre come to meet around a shared "reality". This time it will be Vivianne Perelmuter and François Christophe ideas about travelling.

Images / Prison: visions from inside
In several European countries, film-especially the documentary-has become a focus for workshops on filmmaking, projections and writing, organised within penal institutions. Here we attempt to understand what they mobilise within their makers and the spectators who watch them on the "outside".

Figures of tourism : for a history of the "view"
It is well known that one part of the world makes a spectacle of the other part, and this does not date from the advent of digitalisation or miniaturisation of "picture-taking". From the beginnings of cinema to the present day, what is being played out is a history of the "never seen" and the "already seen". Modern tourism, with its desire for "authenticity" and "discovery, is the central theme of many films bearing the impossible dreams of the "first times". Filmmakers take possession of tourist images, re-examine and re-compose them. The tourist as a character and tourist images as material for critical analysis guide a programme that mingles documentary and fiction, past and present, films and videos by plastic artists… to call into question the contemporary "view".
In partnership with MNAM (Collections Cinéma et Nouveaux Medias), and in association with MK2 Beaubourg and ACRIF.

HD and focus - Sound and design
Filmmakers, cinematographers, critics and sound designers help us to understand how HD and 3D technologies impact filmic expression. The documentary is now subject to a set of practices in which an infinite number of possible techniques question its relationship to "reality".