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Film still from 100-000-Milliards

The Ideal Cinematheque of the Outskirts of the World: Alice Diop, with Amélie Galli

April 17, 2025 @ 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

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 but 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?”
 

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

 

Love Exists (L’amour existe)
Maurice Pialat
France, 1960, 21 min.
A contemplative and poetic short film that depicts the grayness of life and the monotony in the suburbs of Paris at the eve pf the 60s. But hope for social change remains.

Kindertotenlieder
Virgil Vernier
France, 2021, 27 min.
Through television news bulletins, Kindertotenlieder revisits the 2005 riots in France, sparked by the deaths of two teenagers from the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sur-Bois, who were killed during a police chase. Here, the static formal conventions of TV news—vox pop interviews, B-roll of burning cars, outraged neighbors—slowly reveal a subtler narrative beneath the surface: one of neglect, oppression, ethnic and class divisions.

100,000,000,000,000 (100 000 Milliards)
Virgil Vernier
France, 2024, 77 min.
Zakaria Bouti, Mina Gajovic, Victoire Song
They stayed up all night talking in Julia’s room. She told him about palaces, castles, diamonds, and all the gold she had seen. She told him about what happened after death. Afine listened without saying a word, dazzled by all these things he had never heard of before.

This event is co-presented by the Film Study Center at Harvard University and ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).