There is a traffic of images, he wrote, with controllers qualifying and quantifying and giving these images permission to arrive, telling them where to arrive. These controllers then turn themselves into custom officers – Art Cinema this way – Commercial Art that way – Author Cinema straight ahead – Popular Cinema over here – Genre this and Genre that. You can declare your preferences. Experimental Cinema, may we open your bags, please?

And yet, he continued, there not only exists a welcome space for surprise, but there is also a real need for a cinema that will leave its designated niche; a cinema where the tension between a world that is being illustrated and a world that is being illuminated can make us live again in that dream-state so necessary to our very breathing; a cinema, therefore, that will hurt itself against that current order of things, a cinema that will deliver once again that wonderful surprise – that which is still possible.

An echo from far away, yet so close. These thoughts were formulated just over two decades ago by Marc Karlin, who is one of the key figures in this year’s festival programme. Never really at ease amongst the mourning choir of those grieving the irrevocable demise of cinema, he chose to keep on tirelessly searching for a cinema of the possible, one that sets out to keep discovering the world we are living in. This festival is dedicated to the work of reluctant heroes such as Karlin and countless others who today continue to embark on the path of cinematic discovery. Oftentimes ignoring guidelines and sidestepping roadmaps, regularly haunted by uncertainty and confronted with precarity, time and again forced to be on the defensive and pushed towards the margins, but always driven by a single stubborn belief: that cinema continues to offer us possibilities of life.

A few years ago, a six-year-old girl accompanied her father to one of the screenings at the festival and she asked him: “When I blink my eyes, don’t I interrupt the image for the other people here in this theatre?” With this 15th jubilee edition, Courtisane hopes to stay young, to create a meeting space where this question is at home.