A film by Dominique Benicheti
“Some films defiantly refuse to be categorized—‘documentary,’ ‘cinema verite,’ ’minimal cinema,’ are at best half-truths in describing a film like Dominique Benicheti’s. It is all of these and something more. The film is an odd, compelling, hauntingly obsessive study of an old French couple; a record of two lives which have, after nearly eighty years, settled into a rigid routine that has become a last tenuous link with life. Benicheti’s approach is, paradoxically, both intensely personal and highly objective—a filmmaker of remarkable originality.”
-– Richard Whitehall, Filmex, 1974
A lost masterpiece of cinema, Le Cousin Jules was the result of five years of painstaking work by director Dominique Benicheti and cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn. Over that period, they photographed in Cinemascope and recorded in stereophonic sound the daily lives of Jules and his wife—French farmers living alone in the countryside. The result is a ravishing, totally immersive work, in which we not only enter into the subjects’ world but also into the very rhythms of their lives. The film received extraordinary reviews, won the Special Jury Prize prize at Lucarno, and screened at numerous other festivals including Moscow, New Directors/New Films and the Los Angeles International Film Expo. Charles Champlin, writing for The Los Angeles Times, called it "one of those extraordinary discoveries which film festivals ought to always be about." Richard Peña of The New York Film Festival and Dan Talbot of New Yorker Films were among the film’s most passionate advocates.
Despite clear indication from critics and audiences alike that this was a masterwork to be reckoned with, the film did not find a distributor. It was in part because, as one reviewer said, “it defiantly refused to be categorized,” and required a degree of patience from audiences to experience its deep rewards. Additionally, the arthouse theaters for which the film was intended did not have the capacity to screen in the film’s native Cinemascope with stereo sound format, and the director refused any other exhibition format for the film. He believed that the drama of the film, of life and the meaning of it’s ordinary days, was best understood on a monumental scale.
Over the years the negative and existing copies of the film began to disintegrate. Benicheti himself was in the early stages of restoring the film at the laboratory where he worked in France when he died very suddenly in 2011. When one of Benicheti's former students asked Richard Peña to consider the film for the 2012 New York Film Festival, he enthusiastically agreed. A group of the film’s most dedicated supporters then raised the funds for the remainder of the restoration work. The exquisite restoration was completed at Arane-Gulliver, the lab where the director worked during his last years.
Le Cousin Jules awed its audience at the 2012 New York Film Festival. In 2013 it screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Viennale, and the festival Toute la mémoire du monde at la Cinémathèque française in Paris. Its first theatrical release was at Film Forum in New York in December 2013. US distribution is by The Cinema Guild.
-– Richard Whitehall, Filmex, 1974
A lost masterpiece of cinema, Le Cousin Jules was the result of five years of painstaking work by director Dominique Benicheti and cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn. Over that period, they photographed in Cinemascope and recorded in stereophonic sound the daily lives of Jules and his wife—French farmers living alone in the countryside. The result is a ravishing, totally immersive work, in which we not only enter into the subjects’ world but also into the very rhythms of their lives. The film received extraordinary reviews, won the Special Jury Prize prize at Lucarno, and screened at numerous other festivals including Moscow, New Directors/New Films and the Los Angeles International Film Expo. Charles Champlin, writing for The Los Angeles Times, called it "one of those extraordinary discoveries which film festivals ought to always be about." Richard Peña of The New York Film Festival and Dan Talbot of New Yorker Films were among the film’s most passionate advocates.
Despite clear indication from critics and audiences alike that this was a masterwork to be reckoned with, the film did not find a distributor. It was in part because, as one reviewer said, “it defiantly refused to be categorized,” and required a degree of patience from audiences to experience its deep rewards. Additionally, the arthouse theaters for which the film was intended did not have the capacity to screen in the film’s native Cinemascope with stereo sound format, and the director refused any other exhibition format for the film. He believed that the drama of the film, of life and the meaning of it’s ordinary days, was best understood on a monumental scale.
Over the years the negative and existing copies of the film began to disintegrate. Benicheti himself was in the early stages of restoring the film at the laboratory where he worked in France when he died very suddenly in 2011. When one of Benicheti's former students asked Richard Peña to consider the film for the 2012 New York Film Festival, he enthusiastically agreed. A group of the film’s most dedicated supporters then raised the funds for the remainder of the restoration work. The exquisite restoration was completed at Arane-Gulliver, the lab where the director worked during his last years.
Le Cousin Jules awed its audience at the 2012 New York Film Festival. In 2013 it screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Viennale, and the festival Toute la mémoire du monde at la Cinémathèque française in Paris. Its first theatrical release was at Film Forum in New York in December 2013. US distribution is by The Cinema Guild.