Trailer of the 2021 Women’s International Film Festival

A film by Benoît Labourdette (25s & 8s, 2021).

An all online festival... forty films by women directors from all over the world... a new way of doing... 43rd edition of the International Women’s Film Festival (from April 2 to 11, 2021).Two versions of the trailer of the International (…)

Supporting Young People on What Is Theirs to Live

Working on the causes of domination, not only on its effects.

Violence and inequality are effects. Their causes lie partly in the self-representation built within intimacy, where domination comes to compensate for the missing bond. Supporting young people on this ground is therefore central feminist work. (…)

The body-knowledge of fear

On what bodies know about danger that concepts cannot convey.

A woman walking home on foot in the evening holds a bodily knowledge of danger that the man walking down the same street does not share. I propose the concept of body-knowledge to name this knowledge that inscribes itself through exposure, and (…)

Beyond power dynamics: toward a spiritual ethics of romantic relationships

When feminist deconstruction meets the limits of its own analytical framework.

Contemporary feminist debates on romantic relationships privilege analysis through power relations. This approach, however legitimate, can obscure other equally essential dimensions: spirituality, the multiplicity of bonds, and emancipation (…)

Unconditional love between adults

On a therapeutic dogma and what it obscures.

It is regularly claimed, in therapy training, that unconditional love only exists toward children. This claim seems to me mistaken and harmful, because it conflates love with the romantic relationship, and prevents us from seeing how the former (…)

In front of our eyes

Collective film (3’10s, 2021).

Behind every object, the patriarchyIt is a chain, a sequence shot: each person films an object and gives it life, through the voice, putting the object in a situation to evoke an issue related to feminism. The camera is passed from hand to (…)

Trailer of the 2012 Creteil International Women’s Film Festival

In 2012, the International Women’s Film Festival of Créteil is subtitled “The Return of the Fireflies”. The directors of Europe and of the whole world as so many lights of life.On the same principle as in 2011, Benoît Labourdette realizes this (…)

Theater and life

Short reflexion on the definition of reality.

We differentiate between “real life” and theater, like reality and fiction. Understanding more finely the entanglement of the two can undoubtedly allow one to better touch one’s own “truth.”Protest against the separate idea we have of (…)

Rethinking love, work, and autonomy in the age of artificial intelligence.

The new skills to develop for a changing world.

Our era is made of mutations, profound and often invisible. I believe it is time to deconstruct the inner prisons that prevent us from embracing change. Between technological revolution and social emancipation, a reflection on our capacities for (…)

Man

Workshop immersive techniques for creating an exhibition

An account of a method for constructing a point of view and an exhibition.

Students in the Master 2 Audiovisual and Digital Media (AVMN) program at Grenoble University were asked to organize an exhibition on the theme of voluntary interruption of pregnancy (IVG). A methodological account of part of their journey in the (…)

What kind of world do we want?

A film by Benoît Labourdette (0’54s, muet, 2020).

Bibliography in 2020 for the emancipation of women and men.

The Mimetic Struggle

When fighting a form of domination means adopting its own logic.

Confronted with masculinist discourse, part of feminist activism fixes on censorship and punishment. These responses target the most visible effect of patriarchy rather than its causes, and they borrow domination’s own weapons, the posture of (…)

Trailer of the International Women’s Film Festival 2024

A film by Benoît Labourdette (30s & 8s, 2024).

There’s stamina in the careers of great sportswomen and directors alike. Olympe se bouge! Meet the women in front of the camera; directing and self-actualization. International Women’s Film Festival, March 15-24, 2024 in Créteil.Based on a (…)

Domination on Display: An Ethnological Analysis of the 51^st César Ceremony

Eight years after Blanche Gardin, six years after Adèle Haenel, nothing has changed. The system has even strengthened itself.

The César ceremony is a ritual. Not an artistic ritual, but a social one, whose analysis reveals the mechanisms of domination at work in the French film industry. The 51st edition, held on February 26, 2026 at the Olympia, hosted by Benjamin (…)

Non-rival emancipation

I propose a concept for freeing our struggles from the economy of scarcity inherited from domination, and tools for going through the destabilisation that accompanies any genuine emancipation.

Patriarchy organises rivalry between women by making scarce the very things on which it makes their worth depend. I propose the concept of non-rival emancipation, to name struggles whose object, like knowledge or the gaze, grows when it is (…)

“Women and Architecture”: in Villetaneuse, residents film the women who made their town

Cut-paper animation film workshops, held in February and March 2026 in Villetaneuse with the town’s cultural action department and the Annie Ernaux media library, around nine women who built or marked the town.

A travelling exhibition about nine women who built, named or defended Villetaneuse, five cut-paper filmmaking workshops in four places across the town, a public screening on 7 March 2026, and an online space where everyone can find the films. I (…)

Domination

Un film de Benoît Labourdette (1’26s, muet, 2017).

Rebattre les cartes des systèmes de domination.

Trailer of the 2022 Women’s International Film Festival

A film by Benoît Labourdette (22s & 8s, 2022).

Frills, revolt, passions... Intimate or collective fights... The images of the directors will bring you news of the world. 44th edition of the International Women’s Film Festival (March 11 to 20, 2022).From a text written by Jackie Buet, (…)

Fragments of lives

A collective movie (3’20s, 2022).

By sharing all our views, even the most intimate ones, we become stronger!

Cinema and artificial intelligence, two innovations looking at each other

Reflections on technological upheavals and their creative echoes.

Cinema and artificial intelligence share a similar trajectory: disruptive innovations first decried, then becoming transformative industries of our relationship to the world. Parallel revolutions, from contempt to industryCinema shares with (…)

Love and Couples

Rethinking the distinction between romantic feeling and social construction.

We often confuse love and couple, love and sexuality, love and jealousy. Yet love is an immense feeling that largely overflows the framework of the couple and emotional deficiencies. The original confusion: when love is reduced to the couple (…)

Back from Florence

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’00s, 2019).

How a love disappointment leads to even more love.

Drawn cinema

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’04s, silent, 2018).

Abyss of pictorial representations over time.

Good girls

The object that disposes

What machines change in mediation.

When we choose a tool for mediation, we choose a device of relationships. The technical object carries within it a history, a politics, ways of arranging bodies and gazes. This is true of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph in 1895 as much as of (…)

The feminine neutral

Speaking method.

Count the number of people present, and if there is a majority of women, suggest the game of using the “feminine neuter”: “all of us” instead of “all of us” for example.I am a man and I have often proposed this game during trainings or (…)

Podcast: “For a democratic and feminist pedagogy”

Dialogue between Noémie Rubat du Mérac and Benoît Labourdette on June 25, 2022.

Overview of the fundamentals of the pedagogical actions conceived and carried out by Benoît Labourdette, linked to the deconstruction of systems of domination. And concrete methodological proposals.This podcast is built from the recording of a (…)

Patriarchal feminism

When emancipation can reproduce patterns of domination.

Surprisingly, certain forms of struggle against patriarchy can unintentionally reinforce the very structures they seek to combat, particularly within heterosexual couples. I propose an analysis, which I hope is nuanced and useful, of these (…)

Obsolete Mononormativity

Rethinking Emotional Bonds Beyond the Exclusive Couple.

The crisis of contemporary relationships is not so much due to heteronormativity as to mononormativity: this belief that a single person should meet all our emotional, sexual and material needs. The Illusion of Total ComplementarityRecent (…)

Equality is not won!

A collective film (3’12s, 2022).

An intergenerational film to become more aware, and more equipped, to defend equality.

Trailer of the 2020 Creteil Women’s International Film Festival

A film by Benoît Labourdette (8s, 2020).

Unveiling rich movie programming in 8 seconds.For television broadcasts, it was necessary to have a trailer version of only 8 seconds, for the 42nd edition of the Créteil Women’s International Film Festival.The idea co-constructed between (…)

Growing Up in Cultural Contempt

When the Emancipation Sector Manufactures Domination: A Sociological Analysis of an Intimate Experience

Contempt is not an accident of the cultural system; it is its fuel. What François Dubet analyzes on a societal scale, I experienced from childhood in my very flesh as the child of modest artists. The Child in Front of Télérama: An Original Wound (…)

Feminism and Free Love

From 19^th-century anarchist feminists to contemporary decolonial perspectives.

Feminism has maintained a relationship with free love as ancient as it is fruitful, traversed by tensions that remain unresolved and that I believe are important to continue exploring. From its origins, the women’s emancipation movement has (…)

Sexuality #01

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’28s, 2020).

Sexuality, that intimate space that we experience as natural and spontaneous, is in fact largely constructed by our culture. For more sexual fulfillment, a first exercise in deconstructing codes, in the sequel to Martin Page and his book “Beyond (…)

Collective film shot in a movie theater

Creative participation method.

Giving a voice in a creative way to the spectators of a movie theater, before the screening of a film.I put this proposal into practice in the framework of the Feminist Film Festival of the city of Les Lilas in October 2022. I share the method (…)

Feminist Contemplation

Participatory art installation.

Words projected on the walls transform a simple place into a space that invites an intimate thought of feminism.Installation realized in collaboration with the students of the class of 2021/2022 of the Master 2 Audiovisual and Digital Media of (…)

Trailer of the 2011 Creteil Women’s International Film Festival

In 2011, the International Film Festival of Women of Creteil is dedicated to the filmmakers of the South of the Mediterranean.It is entrusted to Benoît Labourdette the realization of the trailer of the Festival. The choice is about something (…)

A definition of feminism

A thought movement in dialogues.

Here is my definition of feminism, from my place as a man: it is for me a movement of thought and action for equal rights between women and men, whose effects also go beyond.“Feminism” is a word that scares many, whether you are a woman, a (…)

Delegated Thinking

Why intellectuals suspend their critical thinking on certain topics.

An intellectual person close to me asserts to me one day, as an established fact, what she has read on the cover of Le Monde: that the newly elected far-right mayors are already “uninhibited.” She has not read the article itself. I had seen that (…)

The Périfééries project’s heritage council of influence

Facilitating collective intelligence in a short space of time.

As part of Saint-Denis’s bid to become European Capital of Culture 2028, I led a collective intelligence session to collect proposals on the subject of “Making local residents active players, from the production to the editorialization of (…)

Putting yourself in the other person’s shoes

A collective film supervised by Benoît Labourdette (2’40s, 2021).

Collective empathy exercise.

DVD set “I’m not a feminist but ...”

Monitoring of design, encoding, authoring and mastering of a 2 DVD box set. ErgonomicsOne of this two DVD set contains a primer. Some letters of the alphabet refer to a short film, others to several. I accompanied the work of ergonomic design, (…)

On systems of domination in the film industry

The reasons for the violence are not what you might think.

The film industry is built on deeply entrenched systems of domination. These hierarchical mechanisms legitimize violence, including sexist violence, and require structural overhaul beyond mere sanctions. The Seductive Power of DominationThe (…)

Definition of the word couple

A film by Benoît Labourdette (1’55s, 2020).

The couple seems to be an evidence in the construction of love and family. Let’s lift the veil on its true history.

Reverse jealousy

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’04s, 2019).

How to turn the deepest jealousy into the most invested love?

Women’s voices

Immersive digital device, designed by Manon Gady and Maïa Hoog.

Immersion in feminist demonstrations, in the word of women.Device conceived and realized by Manon Gady and Maïa Hoog, students of the class of 2021/2022 of the Master 2 Audiovisual and Digital Media of the Université Grenoble Alpes, within the (…)

Trailer of the International Women’s Film Festival 2023

A film by Benoît Labourdette (28s & 8s, 2023).

Through their thoughts, their actions, their words, their images... women have built their emancipation. 45th edition of the International Women’s Film Festival (from 24 march to 2 april 2023).From a series of photographs by Karine Saporta, a (…)

Amorous Permeability

Between self-dissolution and emancipation through pleasure.

How can we fully inhabit the intensity of an amorous bond without dissolving into it? This tension runs through the experience of every strong relationship: the permeability that opens us to the other can also make us lose our contours. Losing (…)

Gisèle Halimi Feminist Film Festival - Ville des Lilas: “Female gaze” workshop

Film creation workshop, to decode the images.

Male gaze ? Female gaze? What is the difference? How do images place us in positions of domination or submission? In the lobby of the Garde-Chasse cinema, Benoît Labourdette installs a film studio that will allow you to create cinema scenes to (…)

What “Pornography” Stops Us From Thinking

Educational puritanism manufactures the very taboo it claims to fight

Florian Vörös proposes that we deconstruct the category “pornography,” inherited from nineteenth-century media regulation. I take his lead onto educational ground: the moralising discourse that claims to protect young people forbids them to speak (…)

Writing workshop in inclusive language

Literary game.

Literary writing game in inclusive language, which can be offered even for a few minutes, in all types of settings and for all ages.Inclusive language is not a consensus at all. And yet, trying to practice it really makes you think about (…)

Trailer of the 2009 Creteil International Women’s Film Festival

The International Festival of Films of Women of Créteil and the Val de Marne, an important institution if it is put forward of the filmmakers (work so important, so precious!), is the 31st edition in 2009, commissioned Benoît Labourdette to (…)

Audiovisual workshops to combat gender stereotypes

Methods for audiovisual creativity.

Thought-provoking ideas and proposals for audiovisual workshop concepts for nuanced and useful actions, with the aim of building critical thinking on gender stereotypes. Stereotypes and dominationThe world has long been largely structured by (…)

Presence in culture

For a conscious emancipation.

I allow myself a critique of the Freudian paradigm: what if human nature were intrinsically good? And I propose the concept of “presence in culture” to move beyond the id-ego-superego triad, in order to cultivate a consciously chosen (…)