I'm filming you! - Komm, ech filmen dech!

Five often playful, sometimes melancholy short films take viewers back to the beginning of the 20th century, to the time of the pioneers of amateur film in Luxembourg. At the request of the Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA), filmmaker Geneviève Mersch has made five short films based on the collection of amateur films archived in Dudelange. The producer, Viviane Thill, explains: "If you're interested, the private images certainly show places and ways of life that have now disappeared, and they give an idea of what Luxembourg was like in the last century (essentially a country where the inhabitants kept to themselves and seemed very attached to their traditional values), but they also reveal flaws, enigmas, emotions and surprises. Rather than revealing "reality" (we often speak, quite wrongly, of the "authenticity" of amateur images), they tell stories, those of the filmmaker who filmed them, those of the people filmed, those of a community or a locality, but also those imagined by the filmmakers and artists who use them today. Geneviève Mersch, with the help of editor Pia Dumont, has done an excellent job of this. They have tried to understand, situate and order these images. But they also let themselves be carried away by them. The films that came out of this process take a playful, poetic look at the amateur images preserved at the CNA." How did people film amateur images in the 1930s? This episode puts amateur films in their intellectual and technical context.