The Competition

Every year, a mere forty students are selected from hundreds of applicants to study at Paris’s La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world. Following in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Claire Simon (OUR BODY) observes the process whereby those lucky forty are selected—an undertaking that is revealed to be highly personal, idiosyncratic, and subject to the vagaries of taste and personal prejudice. Funny, penetrating, and surprisingly suspenseful, THE COMPETITION is not only a unique opportunity to see the inner workings of an institution at the very heart of the French film industry, but an invitation to look at the assumptions and roadblocks that shape higher education in general.