Alice Diop, the filmmaker behind groundbreaking films such as We (Nous, 2021) and Saint Omer (2022), launched in 2020 The Ideal Cinematheque of the Outskirts of the World (La Cinémathèque Idéale des Banlieues du Monde), collecting and screening films that are formally and politically committed to exploring the urban peripheries of the great city capitals, places that are often violently portrayed and appropriated yet rarely have a chance to show their own images on their own terms. As Diop puts it, The Ideal Cinematheque’s work of collecting and assembling representative films raises central questions: “In the periphery, where buildings appear and disappear to the beat of human experiences and urban developments, in a cycle that could seem infinite, cinema represents heritage that nowadays must be revealed, saved and shared. This parallel history of cinema is a continuous flow of erasure and disappearances. The challenge is also to question the logic of our fields of meaning, in the critical relationship to works and their reception. What is a filmmaker or a film ‘from the periphery’? Which stories fall under this category?” – Julie Mallozzi

For this iteration of The Ideal Cinematheque of the Outskirts of the World at Harvard, Diop— alongside Cinematheque programmer Amelie Galli—will present two films by Virgil Vernier: the short Kindertotenlieder (2021) and the feature 100,000,000,000,000 (2024) preceded by one of the seminal works for the Cinematheque, Love Exists (1960) by Maurice Pialat. After the screening, Diop and Galli will present and discuss the Cinematheque and its work.

This event is co-presented by ArtsThursdays and the Film Study Center at Harvard University. No tickets required.