Romain Goupil: bearing the torch for French political cinema

Abstract

Romain Goupil, a key figure in the May 1968 student manifestations, remains one of France's most prolific political film-makers. His apprenticeships under Jean-Luc Godard, Roman Polanski and Chantal Ackerman marked his subsequent work with political consciousness and a proclivity for ceaseless questioning. During three decades of political engagement he has been drawn to the war zones of Sarajevo and Israel, to Berlin before and during the destruction of the Wall, and to the neighbourhoods of France's unwelcome immigrants. Goupil's corpus reflects his refusal to affect impartiality in the face of political engagement; he concedes that the act of political film-making assumes a basic moral perspective whereby the subject chosen will either be condemned as an injustice or celebrated in some way. But instead of treating political problems as equations to be worked out and displayed with values assigned to all variables, Goupil claims his only major ambition is to use film to communicate the sorts of basic existential questions he has always asked himself. This questioning, more than an individual point or message of each film, provides the impetus for Goupil's cinema and political engagement. In this interview, conducted by Sarah Forbey in Goupil's Paris production office, Les Films du Losange, Goupil discussed the political issues surrounding the origins of the film Une Pure Coincidence (2002), as well as the history of his political engagement and his intentions as a film-maker.