ifs-Begegnung: Edimotion & IFFF mit »Beau Travail« und Editorin Gesa Marten

In the organizer's words:

ifs encounter: Edimotion & IFFF
with "Beau Travail" and editor Gesa Marten

as part of the Cologne Cinema Nights 2025

Friday, May 23, 2025 | 7 pm

Free admission

Filmforum NRW | Cinema at Museum Ludwig
Bischofsgartenstr. 1 | 50667 Cologne

On the big screen:

"Beau Travail - The Foreign Legionnaire" (OmU)
(F 1999, Director: Claire Denis, Editing: Nelly Quettier. 90 min. With: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor and others)

Followed by a discussion with editor Gesa Marten,
moderated by Kyra Scheurer, Artistic Director of Edimotion

The former officer Galoup remembers his time in the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, where he served under the command of Sergeant Forestier: driven by jealousy and inner conflict, he set a destructive chain of events in motion after the arrival of the young legionnaire Sentain and thus lost his hitherto strictly ordered everyday life between training rituals and repressed feelings.

"For me, cinema is not made to give a psychological explanation, for me cinema is montage, is editing" (Claire Denis in an interview with The Guardian, 2000).

The strongly choreographed movements, Agnès Godard's cinematic camerawork and, last but not least, Nelly Quettier's accentuated editing congenially support the directorial concept of making the physical the "true off-screen voice of the film".
The renowned German editor Gesa Marten, who will discuss Claire Denis' film and Nelly Quettier's editing work with Kyra Scheurer, is fascinated by this "cinema of bodies that moves": "In 'Beau Travail', you can experience what film editing achieves when it tells a story through showing. It hardly needs any dialog, the relationships are negotiated through looks and bodies."

Nelly Quettier has edited numerous works by Claire Denis, Ursula Meier, Alice Rohrwacher and Barbet Schroeder, among others, and was awarded the European Film Prize in 1992 and the César in 2022. In 2023, she was nominated for the Filmstiftung NRW Editing Award Feature Film for her editing of the Swiss film "La Ligne" at Edimotion.

Gesa Marten mainly edits documentaries and documentary series and has held the professorship for "Artistic Editing of Feature Films and Documentaries" at the Film University Babelsberg since 2014, in addition to other teaching activities. For her editing work, she has been awarded the German Television Award, the German Camera Award for Editing and twice the Edimotion Bild-Kunst Schnitt Preis Dokumentarfilm.

In the event series ifs-Begegnung: Edimotion, we ask editors about their personal favorite films, whose outstanding editing they would like to present.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne.