Some years, writing an editorial is more complicated than others: we don’t always have a relevant idea to share or an event that makes it easy to develop a narrative.
For this fifteenth edition, which also marks the festival’s fifteenth anniversary, it would have been obvious to focus on the anniversary and write a long piece on the subject. Except that, up until now, our anniversaries have always coincided with turbulent times (the terrorist attacks for the fifth edition and the global pandemic for the tenth). So this time, we’re going to skip that step and instead focus entirely on our twentieth anniversary.
But don’t panic, because we have a much more relevant event to celebrate: our tenth anniversary at the Max Linder Panorama! After traveling extensively in its early days, the festival settled at the Max, and we feel right at home there. The most beautiful screen in Paris, a venue that’s entirely dedicated to us for a week, and a team that’s as friendly as it is professional: we wouldn’t want to go anywhere else for anything in the world. And judging by the feedback we’ve been getting from you, the pleasure is mutual.
Another point deserves special attention: over the past fifteen years, we’ve begun to see regulars among those whose films we screen. And this is evident this year, particularly with the return of quite a few familiar faces: whether it’s Freaks, winner of the 2018 Golden Eye award, whose sequel will open the festival, or River by Joshua Giuliano, one of whose short films was in competition in 2019. Not to mention the return of Adam Egypt Mortimer with Pathetic Fallacy — whose first feature film we screened in 2015 — and the new documentary by Poncet and Penso, regulars at PIFFF.
We hope this fifteenth edition will introduce you to new talent and that we’ll see them again for our twentieth anniversary.


The festival team