The programme Mapping Paris: New French Cinema brings together three films in which Paris emerges not merely as an atmospheric backdrop but as a dynamic space where crucial events of French public life in the 2010s unfold. The city becomes a site of bodily and political engagement, a terrain of both collective and personal memory.

In Age of Panic (La bataille de Solférino, 2013), Justine Triet places her heroine in the midst of presidential election day, when tensions in the streets reach a fever pitch. Against this backdrop, a personal drama unfolds for Laetitia (Laetitia Dosch)—a journalist, mother, and woman torn between children, career, and her relationship. Shot partly in documentary style, among actual protesters, the film intertwines the political with the intimate. Triet offers no moral anchor for the viewer: her characters are unpredictable, their actions impulsive, and the film itself hovers between chronicle and fiction. This marked Triet’s feature debut, following earlier work in nonfiction; a decade later, she won the Palme d’Or and global acclaim with Anatomy of a Fall.

Alice Diop takes a different approach in We (Nous, 2021): not drama, but observation tinged with autobiography. At its core is the RER B commuter line, which cuts across the Paris metropolitan area from south to north. The line becomes a metaphor for a fragmented social reality where proximity does not equate to closeness. Diop assembles portraits of residents from geographic and historical periphery—immigrants, teenagers, believers, aristocratic descendants, intellectuals. Through everyday rhythms and acts of memory, she binds them into a fragile “we”, which resonated as a symbol of solidarity post-Charlie Hebdo. Yet she also asks: who is included in this “we”, and on what grounds?

In Paris Memories (Revoir Paris, 2022), Alice Winocour remains within fiction, but her impulse comes from lived experience: the Bataclan attack, which her brother survived. The protagonist Mia (Virginie Efira) endures an assault in a Parisian bistro and, having lost her memory, wanders through the city to piece herself back together. Winocour sidesteps political commentary, focusing instead on aftermath: trauma, fractured perception, and the unifying power of pain and grief. A recurring motif is disappearance—of memories, makeshift memorials, and undocumented workers omitted from victim lists.

All three films are directed by women, representatives of new French cinema, where observation of reality is rooted not in detachment but in immersion, experience, and complicity. This is not about a singular “female” aesthetic but a gaze under which women on screen are not passive figures but active participants in urban life. Their lives extend beyond the domestic spaces and social groups they belong to: they move through the city, interact with its inhabitants, reveal invisible connections, and create new ones—personal, political, emotional.

Alisa Nasrtdinova