Excentris and Technicolor: First Prize, Then the Big Screen
In 2014, I won first prize in the Ma bande-annonce en Technicolor competition, organized around Cinéma Excentris’s fifteenth anniversary. It’s an important memory from my early years as an independent filmmaker: creating a trailer for a cinema venue, then discovering it would accompany regular screenings.
Emails from that time bring me back to the competition’s second edition. The awards ceremony was announced for March 20, 2014, and the next day David Lamarre thanked participants while sharing the results and photographs of the evening. Rediscovering these traces puts a date on that stage of my career.
What I keep from the experience is the pleasure of working on a creation about cinema itself. A trailer is a short format, but it requires thinking about images, editing and rhythm together. Here, it also became a visual signature for Excentris, a venue with which my work would now be associated before screenings.
The recognition had a very concrete continuation. On April 17, 2014, David confirmed that the cinema had received the Technicolor transfer and begun presenting the new visual signature. The creation was leaving my editing room to reach cinema screens.
I had been able to watch it on the big screen at Technicolor that same day. My April 18 reply left no doubt about my enthusiasm: I was happy with the result and eager to discover the trailer in Excentris’s programme. That message reminds me of the energy of the early years, when seeing your images in a cinema gives the work a new dimension.
Looking back, that first prize remains a meaningful vote of confidence. It represents both recognition of my creation and encouragement to continue. Above all, it preserves something very simple: the happiness of seeing an idea find its place on a big screen.
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