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A Young Poet
(Un jeune poète)

Directed by Damien Manivel.
With Rémi Taffanel, Léonore Fernandes, Enzo Vassallo.
France, 2015, DCP, color, 71 min.
French with English subtitles.
DCP source: Unifrance/Institut Français

The young poet of the title is of course the main character, a teenager who experiences the highs and lows of love while trying to find traces of a major French bard, Paul Valéry. Here in the city of Sète by the Mediterranean Sea, where Agnès Varda shot her first film (La Pointe courte) sixty years ago, Valéry lies in his grave; meanwhile, a very attractive local girl jumps and smiles and jokes and drinks. The boy, tall and pale and shy, has a long road in front of him that includes both the girl and the grave, and maybe more. But the poet is also filmmaker Damien Manivel himself, a poet who believes in the magic powers of the simplest and most considerate idea of cinema, which is that light and movement, bodies and space, recorded with care and affection, are more than enough to make you smile and think, to make you shiver with the breath of the art of filmmaking.

Part of film series

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Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow