An annual call for proposals

The call for projects organized by the Ministry of Culture aims to encourage ethnological research and to promote knowledge of the intangible cultural heritage of the different components of the national ensemble (hexagon and overseas).

Learn more about the Department’s call for proposals

Support for festivals

The Ministry of Culture participates in several documentary festivals with ethnographic scope: the Cinéma du Réel, the Jean-Rouch international festival and the Altérités festival.

Created by ethnographic filmmaker Jean-Rouch, this international festival is a European documentary film event related to the humanities and social sciences. Each year in Paris, it presents more than 70 documentary films and, at the end of each screening, devotes an important moment of exchange between filmmakers, producers, researchers, students, programmers and spectators present.

This international event, between culture and science, is organized by the Ethnographic Film Committee and the CNRS. Admission to all sessions and events is free.

Since the organization of the first Jean-Rouch Festival (formerly Bilan du film ethnographique), more than 1,300 films, and as many new views from all over the world, were projected, reflecting the social and cultural evolution of human societies and the richness of their diversity.

In 2011, the festival celebrated its thirtieth anniversary by organizing exceptional events in Paris, in the region and abroad, to meet an ever more enthusiastic and curious public. Thirty years of cinema to see the world differently and reflect on the future of men, to overcome the placid description of reality, to go out of the beaten paths of exoticism, finally to hear the word of all.

Ethnographic cinema has grown up around the world under the name of Visual Anthropology.
We felt it was important to celebrate this ‘age-changing ritual’ during an annual Ethnographic Film Review.” Jean Rouch
 

La Fabrique de patrimoines en Normandie, ethnopôle labellisé par le ministère de la Culture, relaunched the festival "Altérités" in 2017. The festival offers a selection of ethnographic and sociological documentary films that show and reflect the diversity of human societies, from the most distant to the closest. The festival shows and hears the testimony of rugbymans, slaughterhouse workers, prostitutes, soldiers, war reporters, fishermen, merchant seamen, wrestlers, uranium miners who all live with danger.

The programming, built in part with the partnership of the Ethnographic Film Committee, is accompanied by meetings and exchanges with directors, authors, filmmakers and researchers in the social sciences, including ethnologists. The interventions of researchers, artists and activists will open the debate with the public on this subject that involves us all, if only as citizens.

The Cinéma du Réel is an international festival of ethnographic and sociological films. The event is organized by the Public Information Library (BPI) in collaboration with the association Friends of the Real Cinema.

The festival mixes documentary, essay and experimentation in selections that reflect the diversity of genres and forms of cinematic approach of the world. This makes it one of the few documentary film festivals that focus on heritage and the memory of the genre, while making them interact with contemporary creation.

A discoverer of young talents, Cinéma du Réel is also attentive to established filmmakers, whose latest works and older films it shows. The festival has thus contributed to reveal on the international scene many directors, now known to the general public.