Since 1995, the Périphérie association organizes the Rencontres du cinéma documentaire (Meetings of Documentary Cinema), and since 2005 presents each October a one-week long non-competitive festival at the cinema Le Méliès of Montreuil. Open to diverse audiences, the festival brings together heritage films and recent works around a cinematic theme.

The 13th edition of AVANT is a tribute to Michael Snow’s film So Is This. A film that consists only of text and challenges the idea that film, or language, refers to a surrounding world. This, in So Is This is simply the event that unfolds when the film takes place.

Besides Michael Snow (Canada) the filmmakers Els van Riel (Belgium), Esther Urlus (Netherlands) and Elke Groen (Austria) are invited. All three deals with film as an event and with the material specificity of film; van Riel with time, Urlus with the materiality of film colour, and Groen with the actual memory of the film material.

Black Box is the regular experimental strand at Edinburgh International Film Festival, curated by Kim Knowles. It comprises four shorts programmes dealing with the body and technology, journeys and discoveries, ritual and transformation, and matters of the environment, and two feature films. In the context of the Festival’s 70th anniversary, Black Box revisits the 1970s with two retrospective screenings and a special event celebrating one of the most important periods in the history of the Festival.