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Electric Shadows
Les Porteurs D'ombres Electriques

FRANCE / 1994 / Chinese, French / Color/ 16mm /26 min

Director, Script:
Hervé Cohen, Renaud Cohen
Photography: Nurith Aviv
Editing: Paul Stein, Charlotte Boigeol
Sound: Olivier Schwob
Producer: Marie - Claude Reverdin
Production Company, Source: Les Flims Grain de Sable
206, rue de Charenton, 75012 Paris FRANCE
Phone: 33-1-4344-1672
Fax: 33-1-4019-0756
E-mail:ncohen@films-graindesable.com


Hervé Cohen

Born 1963. Studied law and audiovisual communication. Worked on documentary projects as a camera operator. His first directorial effort, Sikambano, les fils du bois sacré ("Sons of the Sacred Woods," 1991) has been screened at Festival Dei Popli in Florence, at the Ethnographic film biennial in Paris, and at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York.


Renaud Cohen

Born 1964. Spent some time in China and in Taiwan where he started shooting documentary footage on Super 8 and on Video. Received an MA in Chinese and Cinema, then studied directing at FEMIS (French national film school). His second fictional short Réflexions d'un garçon received the Young Audiences Prize in the Côté Courts program at the Pantin Festival.

This film documents the dedication of an itinerant team of two male and one female projectionists as they run a traveling movie theater in a remote section of Sichuan, China. Besieged by the constant threat of television, and bereft of state support for such mobile projection teams in the wake of the economic reforms of the 1980s, these three public servants sling their reels and projector on carrying poles, and like traveling salesmen, they scale mountains and ford rivers in their efforts to "peddle" their "electric shadows" from village to village. This documentary's highlight comes when a popular movie from forty years ago is screened at a wedding reception and the guests begin to belt out the theme song in perfect unison. The scene is the film's greatest spectacle, but it is also an homage to the popular form of entertainment that is film itself, and a testimony to the traveling projectionists who support cinema at its most basic level.[Fukushima Yukio]
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COPYRIGHT:Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Organizing Committee