Cinema Takes Place in the Imagination: A Day with Antoine Thirion

During his visit to the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (FIDOCS) 2025, film critic and programmer Antoine Thirion offered a masterclass to film students in which he recounted the experiences and encounters that have shaped his relationship to cinema. Thirion – born in Lille in 1981 and now based in Paris – has long approached cinema as something to be sought out rather than inherited. Without formal academic training, he learned by following the films and people who mattered to him: the classical Hollywood directors and Japanese masters who ignited his cinephilia in adolescence, and later Jean Douchet, whose itinerant film-club practice revealed cinema as a more vibrant landscape than the traditional classroom. His trajectory, in many ways, echoes Nietzsche’s affirmation that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”¹ and, even more so, the conviction that cinema is not experienced only on the screen but also “in the open air,”² with friends and along paths where film-thinking becomes a form of wandering. For Thirion, this form of cinema does not only address our daytime self, but as Pierre Léon would suggest, “a second body that lives within us”,³ one we usually overlook and yet surfaces as if magnetised by certain images that know us better than we know ourselves, and with which we sustain a passionate dialogue. These encounters, for Thirion, enrich cinephilia and redefine what it means to meet a film, to be moved by it, and to be changed in its company.

It is then no surprise that Thirion’s professional life has been informed by this same wandering ethos: as a programmer for Cinéma du Réel, an advisor to the New York Film Festival, and previously at Locarno and the Berlinale, he has championed films that demand attention, time, and relations with a cinematic world revealed in the open. His curatorial work – ranging from major retrospectives of James Benning, Hong Sang-soo, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz, Deborah Stratman, Pedro Costa, Ben Rivers, Roger Corman, Isabelle Huppert, Bertrand Bonello, among others – reflects his commitment to filmmakers and artists who expand not only the language of cinema but the conditions in which it can be thought and experienced. 

In this conversation, Thirion invites us to conceive films as a living experience, even as an organism: to approach them not as stable objects but as encounters shaped by movement, light, and the unpredictable exchanges that transform our ways of seeing and listening. In his words, this is a cinema that is always at risk and struggling – yet, and precisely for that reason, fully alive.

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Antoine Thirion: I don’t expect you to know my work, so I’ll start by talking about myself, my career so far, and a few projects I’m particularly proud of. I plan to spend some time on each project, then leave some room for discussion.

I didn’t spend much time at university, so I had to invent my own path, figuring out along the way what I was doing, how it made sense to me, and how it could serve the kind of cinema I love. My parents were state workers (high school teacher / tax collector), and I grew up in the north of France, far from Paris’s cultural world. My first impulse was to leave and explore cinema beyond my immediate environment.

I became interested in film around the age of 15 or 16. I was drawn to classical Hollywood cinema and Japanese filmmakers like Ozu and Naruse. In high school, a classmate named Matthias Douchet told me about his great uncle, Jean Douchet, who wouldn’t have liked the Star Wars reboot. Curious, I connected the dots and realised my friend was Jean Douchet’s nephew. Jean Douchet was a cinephile who travelled across France leading film clubs, discussing directors he admired, from Hitchcock to Japanese auteurs. He came to Lille, my hometown, for a weekend of film analysis. Too shy to approach him directly, I sent him a letter, and soon I began meeting him regularly in Paris. He eventually introduced me to other young cinephiles at Cahiers du Cinema and the Cinematheque. (Jean Douchet also appeared as an actor in several New Wave films, such as La maman et la putain (Jean Eustache 1973) and Une sale histoire (Jean Eustache 1977), which is a film divided into two halves, with two characters recounting the same anecdote – he played one of them.)

Antoine Thirion’s masterclass at FIDOCS School, with a photograph of Jean Douchet projected on the screen

Through these connections, I began contributing to Cahiers du Cinema in the early 2000s, starting with their website rather than the print magazine. The online platform allowed us to experiment with new forms of criticism, combine programming with analysis, and create a more dynamic editorial space. I started writing at 19, tackling radical filmmakers like Straub and Costa. My co-workers were not only critics but also poets, curators, and philosophers, which expanded my perspective beyond traditional cinephilia. I worked on the website for about two years until rivalries with the print edition caused it to pause. When the website’s editor became head of the print magazine in 2003, I transitioned to the print team.

Around that time, festivals were particularly exciting. It was a moment of decentralisation: people worldwide were using small cameras to make bold, radical films. My first Cannes experience in 2004 introduced me to filmmakers like Raya Martin, Lisandro Alonso, and Albert Serra. Their work felt fresh and daring, especially in the durational cinematic space I was interested in. One standout experience then was seeing Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) at the main competition of the Festival. I was so captivated that I saw it twice in one evening. Coming from an arts background, I recognised how cinema could intersect with contemporary art, expanding the field of work I wanted to explore as a writer. I was always somewhat averse to writing alone at home. Festivals and meeting filmmakers became a way to stay engaged, combining critical work with practical support for their projects. Also, working at Cahiers du Cinema, which is an old cinema magazine, I experienced the cyclical nature of cultural institutions. Every ten years, new owners would take over, disrupt operations, and force staff transitions. My cycle was 2003–2009. During this period, I realised that Cahiers du Cinema’s traditional structure was inadequate for the evolving cinema landscape of the 2010s.

Tropical Malady

Together with Eugenio Renzi, a colleague, we created a website called Independencia. Without a budget, we reimagined how film could be discussed online. We redrew images instead of using press stills, developed a unique graphic identity, and even introduced playful rating systems. The website allowed immediate festival coverage, interviews, and reviews, creating a dynamic space for international cinema beyond traditional distribution channels. At the same time, we became friends with Mark Peranson from Cinema Scope, which is a magazine that focused on radical, non-theatrically released films. These connections exposed me to filmmakers and movements that were largely absent from French criticism. A pivotal moment here was discovering American filmmaker James Benning and his 16mm film RR (2008) that was showing at Berlinale at the time. Benning, however, had never received attention in French criticism. He was barely mentioned during Cahiers du Cinema‘s long history. I eventually programmed a full retrospective of his work in a Paris museum. This project combined programming and criticism: we produced interviews, essays, and documentation at Independencia, presenting Benning’s work comprehensively rather than thematically.

Since then, I’ve approached retrospectives with the same philosophy: presenting the full work of filmmakers like Ben Rivers, Lav Diaz, Deborah Stratman, and others who may be overlooked in conventional circuits. The focus is always on meaningful engagement for both audiences and the filmmakers themselves. For instance, in a Ben Rivers retrospective at the Jeu de Paume we did a couple of years ago, instead of traditional introductions, we commissioned contemporary fiction writers to produce short stories as film introductions.

One of the projects I’m most proud of is this work we did with Ben Rivers. While we often organise monographic retrospectives, I don’t always feel the need to accompany them with a book – it can feel like a waste of paper, especially when the same texts are available online. But when a book can have meaningful resonance, we do it, integrating text production with the vision of the films. Also, Ben is very interested in literature and reads widely, and it was important that the content we produced was significant to the filmmaker as well. So, instead of standard film introductions, we commissioned fiction writers to create short stories that would serve as introductions to each film program. Ben was excited by the concept, collaborated with Fireflies Press, and together we linked the retrospective and the book through a shared title.

Antoine Thirion’s Masterclass at FIDOCS School

Programming Ben’s films involved dealing with many short works, so we grouped them to identify trends and then presented these programs to the authors, who used them as inspiration for their texts. Because we couldn’t bring all the writers to the cinema, we recorded them reading their texts on video. These ten-minute introductions at the start of each screening set a thoughtful and performative tone for the films – a style of programming that I find essential.

I started seeking new experiments around 2013. A friend who had inherited land in northern Corsica invited me to organise screenings on his property. We created a “cinema game,” building a temporary theatre each day and dismantling it at night. Audiences discovered films in new and unexpected spaces, and we even involved villagers by transporting the screen to a local church.

This small, DIY project eventually evolved into Providenza, a residency with cabins, a concrete theatre, and post-production facilities. It became a hub for creative collaboration, offering residencies and community engagement while maintaining a spirit of adventurous and performative cinema.

Providenza Residency, Corsica

Another project I’d like to mention is a performance I developed in 2016 in collaboration with Raya Martin. Invited by the Asia Culture Centre in Gwangju, South Korea, to conceive two performances, we explored the concept of “Lost Films” – films that don’t exist. The first performance, How he died is controversial, researched on the killing of Indigenous leaders in the Philippines in the 1970s by the Marcos regime. We stayed in the house of one of the victims, engaged with the community, produced an oral history archive. We then had a script written and devised the performance as a script reading with a cast of actors getting into the roles of this fictional lost film.

For the second performance, Raya had the idea to “perform a film festival”. We announced a festival called UNdocumenta where many retrieved lost films would be shown, except at the last minute, all screenings were performed in different ways. In this festival we also had an exhibition about an extinct film industry in Myanmar’s Karen territory, a pitching session of Chinese projects about Western monuments replicas, and Korean archivists nightmares turned into meditation sessions. In any case, this project was not about creating material artifacts; the idea was to think of cinema as something ephemeral, performative and intangible. The only lasting artifact was a catalogue – a blend of films that have existed and films that don’t. The performance of the festival itself emphasised process over product: films happened in the imagination, in the head, rather than [solely] on the screen.

In these projects, I am trying to explore the boundary between programming, criticism, and creation. Criticism is a precarious profession. In France, the price of a sheet hasn’t changed in twenty five years. Many talented critics are no longer able to make a living solely from writing, so for me, programming and collaboration have become ways to be useful, to create a meaningful engagement with filmmakers and audiences.

HOMES – Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2024), by Antoine Thirion (Ed.)

Cinema can exist as a psychic phenomenon as well. Apichatpong often talks about the length of dreams mirroring the length of a conventional film. He records his dreams in notebooks alongside his thoughts, memories, and sketches, which then inform his narratives. A film can unfold entirely in the mind, independent of physical screens or spaces. This approach shaped how Raya and I worked with performances. In UNdocumenta one meditation-based performance guided audiences to visualise scenes in their imagination, describing feelings, locations, and movements rather than presenting images or scripts. The goal was to put the imagination into motion, to allow cinema to unfold internally, as an experience that is both intimate and communal.

In other words, the work I do is not about the traditional industry of film distribution or box office success. I’m drawn to cinema that is alive, precarious, and intellectually vibrant – films that are always in danger. My interest lies in creating conditions for such cinema to exist, to be experienced, and to provoke reflection, rather than in conventional economic measures of success.

Antonia Girardi: How does your approach redefine the role of the critic or programmer?

Thirion: For me, it’s about working within my own limitations. I write, but only a handful of texts truly satisfy me. Rather than trying to fit into traditional critical roles, I focus on being useful to filmmakers, exploring cinema as an experience beyond judgment. Criticism has become mostly a hobby, economically unsustainable. True engagement is about inventing ways of working that matter – both to oneself and to the films and audiences involved. In this sense, academic concepts can distance audiences from cinema. I learned most from critics who showed films rather than dissected them academically. Cinema is alive when it engages directly with viewers and communities, not when it exists solely in theory.

Cristóbal Escobar: What do you mean by films “happening in the head”?

Thirion: Cinema doesn’t need a projector, a theatre and a screen to exist. Cinema is a psychic apparatus. We’re all producing films in our heads when we sleep. Even when we’re awake, we substitute reality with our interpretations and expectations to protect ourselves from the unpredictability of reality. But cinema is not just a dream, a fantasy or a delirium, it is a communal experience, and a deliberate withdrawal allowing us to reflect on and see the present anew. This is the ritual we’re all engaged in. We’re stepping out to think and dream, then share these interconnected private memories.

Endnotes