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Tiktok app, LD stock photo
TikTok short videos represent the “freedom to create” without the need for money and the possibility of inventing a “new visual grammar” with vertical planes, believe the young people who use this popular application, associated with this edition of the Cannes Festival.
For the first time, the platform launched a short film contest, to give visibility to creations“Much better built than what (tiktokers) usually do,” explains Angèle Diabang, a Senegalese filmmaker, member of the #TikTokShortfilm jury, who handed over the award. her awards on Friday.
Claudia Cochet, a 34-year-old French actress and assiduous tiktoker, achieved & oacute; the “best screenplay” award for a three-minute play, “Princesse moderne”.
A stage actress, Cochet discovered the Chinese platform in 2020, when I couldn’t act due to confinement.
“Currently I post a video almost every day, scenes of daily life with a tendency towards the fantastic . I have 250,000 subscribers,” he explains to AFP.
“TikTok offers me creative freedom and an audience” and it “gives me the confidence to do things on my own”.
For the #TikTokShortfilm contest, this creator wanted to tackle a serious topic, which does not fit in principle with the playful tone of the platform: violence against women.
Exceptionally, the actress wielded a piece of her work. a 16K camera. Her creation shows no physical violence, and there are few words, but instead there are many signs of the discomfort and emotion surrounding an abused girl who ends up committing something irreparable to defend herself.
“When you are a victim of domestic violence you don’t dare to say it, but you can show it” explains Cochet.
“New visual grammar”
“One may think that three minutes is short, but we have really tried to judge them as movies. ;120 minute butts” he explained Camille Ducellier, French director, member of the jury, during the awards ceremony.
The vertical format imposed by TikTok“allows us to reinvent a whole new visual grammar”, she assures .
“This frame is not only something that identifies the mobile phone, but also alludes to a window, a door, and suddenly it approaches the painting.”
Eric Garandeau , director of TikTok France, who devised the contest, assured that “tens of thousands of creators” from 44 countries participated.
TikTok, he says, “takes us back to the origins of cinema”.
“Cinema today is sometimes a bit ‘obese’ and TikTok offers a shorter alternative and a more intense experience”, he estimates.
The Slovenian Matej Rimanic, who won The Grand Prize, does a nod to those first creations in the history of cinema with a black and white love story, in which two twentysomethings send messages to each other using paper airplanes.< /p>
The jury for this first prize was heterogeneous, from Khaby Lame, who according to the platform is the second person with the most followers in the world, to the Franco-Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, president of the jury.< /p>
Rithy Pahn surprised everyone. in Cannes when presenting his resignation, alluding to “pressure” of the platform on the choice of the jury. Hours later, just before the awards ceremony, he announced: that I returned to form part of the panel of judges, that in his opinion & quot; to be sovereign”.