Clément Cogitore

Directing

Clément Cogitore

Born 1983-08-27 · Colmar, France

Acting credits

Gallant Indies poster
7.5

Stéphane Lissner, director of the Paris Opera, entrusts the staging of the opera-ballet Les Indes galantes to the visual artist Clément Cogitore. Based on the experience of his short film Les Indes galantes, the artist updates Jean-Philippe Rameau's baroque masterpiece (1735) by bringing together lyric song and urban dance. The choreography is entrusted to Bintou Dembélé who supervises dancers from krump, popping, voguing or even experimental hip hop. From rehearsals to the Premiere, Philippe Béziat films the meeting of urban dancers with the lyric institution and invites the spectator to share a human and artistic experience.

Gallant Indies

2021

No artwork available
3.7

Virgile and Blanche, both aged 17, correspond by e-mail. Virgile loves Blanche, but Blanche loves a boy named Eustache. Nobody knows the other's thoughts. Virgile talks about life and death and Blanche listens acceptingly. Eustache enters the room in a blue cap. He sees Virgile first, then Blanche. Then Blanche remembers having danced with Virgile and leves the room to join him.

Correspondances

2007

Room 999 poster
5.8

In 1982, Wim Wenders asked 16 of his fellow directors to speak on the future of cinema, resulting in the film Room 666. Now, 40 years later, in Cannes, director Lubna Playoust asks Wim Wenders himself and a new generation of filmmakers (James Gray, Rebecca Zlotowski, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Nadav Lapid, Asghar Farhadi, Alice Rohrwacher and more) the same question: “is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”

Room 999

2023

La Sapienza poster
6.0

The story is one of an architect that has lost his inspiration and goes looking for those motivations that pushed him as a youngster to take up the profession. Inspiring him was the baroque movement and all of its artifices: the Guarini in Turin and the Borromini in Rome. The film’s central story ends up being the love story that develops between architecture, artistic inspiration and feelings.

La Sapienza

2014

Memories poster
5.5

Previously focused on Asian directors, “Jeonju Digital Project 2007” takes a look at Europe. The Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, and the French filmmaker Eugène Green participated in this project.

Memories

2007

Behind the camera

Visités poster
NR

She losses her sight. Once back among friends and family: blindness, isolation and a strange perception of the bodies around her. Rejection of this changes and an abrupt decision to put an end to it all. In the peacefulness of early morning, the terms of a new shared existence take shape.

Visités

2007

Visités poster
NR

She losses her sight. Once back among friends and family: blindness, isolation and a strange perception of the bodies around her. Rejection of this changes and an abrupt decision to put an end to it all. In the peacefulness of early morning, the terms of a new shared existence take shape.

Visités

2007

Sons of Ramses poster
5.8

Thirty-four year old Ramsès has established himself as a clairvoyant in La Goutte d’Or, Paris. A shrewd manipulator and something of a poet, he built a sound business consoling people. Elusive and dangerous youths, freshly arrived from the streets of Tangier, disrupt his business and the whole neighbourhood. Until the day Ramses has an actual vision.

Sons of Ramses

2023

Sons of Ramses poster
5.8

Thirty-four year old Ramsès has established himself as a clairvoyant in La Goutte d’Or, Paris. A shrewd manipulator and something of a poet, he built a sound business consoling people. Elusive and dangerous youths, freshly arrived from the streets of Tangier, disrupt his business and the whole neighbourhood. Until the day Ramses has an actual vision.

Sons of Ramses

2023

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Rivo Alto

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Rivo Alto

Mozart: The Magic Flute @  Aix-en-Provence Festival 2026 poster
NR

For years, *The Magic Flute* has been one of the most frequently performed operas at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. After an eight-year absence, Mozart’s work is now back on the programme. Clément Cogitore interprets the plot as a modern coming-of-age story: Tamino and Pamina leave the world of childhood behind and enter a reality in which beauty is fragile and truth is uncertain.

Mozart: The Magic Flute @ Aix-en-Provence Festival 2026

2026

Braguino poster
7.3

In the middle of the Siberian taiga, 450 miles from the nearest village, live two families : the Braguines and the Kilines. Not a single road leads there. A long trip on the Ienissei River, first by boat, then by helicopter, is the only way to reach Braguino. Self-sufficient, both families live there according to their own rules and principles. In the middle of the village: a barrier. The two families refuse to speak. In the river sits an island, where another community is being built : that of the children. Free, unpredictable, wild. Stemming from the fear of the other, that of wild beasts, and the joy procured by the immensity of the forest, unravels a cruel tale in which tensions and fear give shape to the geography of an ancestral conflict.

Braguino

2017

Braguino poster
7.3

In the middle of the Siberian taiga, 450 miles from the nearest village, live two families : the Braguines and the Kilines. Not a single road leads there. A long trip on the Ienissei River, first by boat, then by helicopter, is the only way to reach Braguino. Self-sufficient, both families live there according to their own rules and principles. In the middle of the village: a barrier. The two families refuse to speak. In the river sits an island, where another community is being built : that of the children. Free, unpredictable, wild. Stemming from the fear of the other, that of wild beasts, and the joy procured by the immensity of the forest, unravels a cruel tale in which tensions and fear give shape to the geography of an ancestral conflict.

Braguino

2017

Chroniques poster
NR

A filmic essay/poem blending fictional images and archival footage from the Pathé and Gaumont collections from the early XXth century. Based on two figures/characters and paced by their interior monologues, Chroniques explores the mythologies of exile and exodus. From the grain of stock footage to the pixel of digital image, this film peruses the history of Europe the way we peruse a family photo album : between personal account and fictionalization.

Chroniques

2006

The Wakhan Front poster
6.3

Afghanistan, 2014. As the withdrawal of troops approaches, Captain Antarès Bonassieu and his squad have been assigned a surveillance mission in a remote valley of Wakhan, on the border of Pakistan. Despite Antarès and his men’s determination, control of the secluded valley will slowly fall out of their hands. One dark night, soldiers begin to mysteriously disappear in the valley.

The Wakhan Front

2015

The Wakhan Front poster
6.3

Afghanistan, 2014. As the withdrawal of troops approaches, Captain Antarès Bonassieu and his squad have been assigned a surveillance mission in a remote valley of Wakhan, on the border of Pakistan. Despite Antarès and his men’s determination, control of the secluded valley will slowly fall out of their hands. One dark night, soldiers begin to mysteriously disappear in the valley.

The Wakhan Front

2015

Memory Palace poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Memory Palace

2026

Bielutine poster
NR

Tucked away in their Moscow apartment, Ely and Nina Bielutine jealously guard one of the most significant and mysterious Renaissance art collections in Russia. Surrounded by their crow and cats, under the watchful eye of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rubens, Ely and Nina live in a world of their own, a fictional realm where art and lies have gradually gotten the upper hand over reality.

Bielutine

2011

Among Us poster
6.0

Amin, a young illegal immigrant, has recently joined a group of other illegal immigrants camping in the forest. With every night comes the opportunity to attempt sneaking into the dockyards and hiding under a truck.

Among Us

2012

Among Us poster
6.0

Amin, a young illegal immigrant, has recently joined a group of other illegal immigrants camping in the forest. With every night comes the opportunity to attempt sneaking into the dockyards and hiding under a truck.

Among Us

2012

30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille poster
NR

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.

30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille

2019

Morgestraich poster
NR

Cogitore pays tribute to the Carnival of Basel, an event held in the eponymous town in Switzerland since the Middle Ages. The Morgestraich marks the beginning of the carnival activities when the lights are turned off at exactly 4 am and groups of musicians parade through the streets with lanterns to the sound of pipes and drums. The piece features elaborately dressed carnival participants against a dark backdrop, walking continually toward an invisible crowd.

Morgestraich

2022

Élégies poster
NR

Hundreds of small luminous screens float above a human sea : a concert audience takes pictures with their cell phones of a scene outside the frame. Like the subtitles of an absent song, or the inner voice of an invisible narrator, verses from R.M. Rilke’s "Duino Elegies" punctuate this enormous collective wave of energy redolent of a digital ceremony.

Élégies

2014

Travel(ing) poster
NR

Video performance made using a lorry, a generator and a 16mm projector, Travel(ing) compares the reality of an experience with its representation in film.

Travel(ing)

2005

The Amorous Indies poster
8.0

Les Indes Galantes (The amorous indies), is an opera-ballet created by Jean Philippe Rameau in 1735. He was inspired for one of the dance by tribal Indian dances of Louisiana performed by Metchigaema chiefs, in Paris in 1723. Clément Cogitore adapts a short part of the ballet by mobilizing a group of Krump dancers, an art form born in Los Angeles black ghetto in the 1990s. Its birth occurred in the aftermath of the beating up of Rodney King and the riots, as well as police repression it triggered. Amidst this coercive atmosphere, young dancers started to embody the violent tensions of the physical, social and political body. Both the tribal dance performed in Paris in 1723, and the rebelious Krump dancers of the 1990s shape a reenactment of Rameau’s original libretto, staging young people dancing on the verge of a volcano.

The Amorous Indies

2018

No artwork available
NR

An inventory of incendiary practices across the world at the beginning of the 21st century as reflected in social and popular rituals, festivals, savage celebrations, riots and military offensives. This work is about the hypnotic power of flames and their spreading in jubilation, communion, transgression or terror.

Burning Cities

2009

Tahrir poster
NR

This work is conceived around the reuse of television footage of one of the protest demonstrations against the Mubarak regime during the second revolution in 2011, in Cairo's Tahrir square.

Tahrir

2012

Sans titre (Lascaux) poster
NR

Archive film of the Lascaux cave

Sans titre (Lascaux)

2017