Documentary film workshop with Alessandro Comodin

"This year, there's been a lot of talk about pebbles on tiles and eggs dangerously stuffed into jeans pockets.

The pebbles, I confess, were me, Alessandro Comodin, a forty-something Italian director, who had thrown them at the windows of my new apprentice filmmakers. It was my mission, or so I interpreted it. Yes, I was the one who threw those pebbles, because I've always enjoyed being disturbed by a friend who might have dropped by unexpectedly, because he or she didn't know what better to do than to come to my house. So, as so often with the gifts we give, it's the ones we'd like to receive, I took the liberty of getting young people off their sofas and into the dark and magical world of documentaries. Or that they might simply open the windows without fear.

The eggs, on the other hand, were the students' projects. The image of the egg may be banal, but it's been a nutritional staple since long before the happy experience of Noah's Ark, and not to displease vegans or allergy sufferers, because eggs were never to be eaten or broken, just put in your pocket and kept there. A highly perilous exercise, but you can't be a filmmaker's apprentice without an acute awareness of the passage of time and the fragility of appearances.

Let me conclude with a quote from Julio Cortazar. In 1980, he was invited to give a series of lectures to students at Berkeley. At one point he said that an idea is like a bird that sneaks in through the window; you never know when it's going to fly in, and it's not easy to catch it. I would add that you still need to have your windows open. We've learned that this year, that it's really nice to open your windows a little bit every day, even at night, because a bird might come in or a friend might throw a pebble in, and you never know when that pebble might turn into an egg."

Alessandro Comodin, director

• Morgane Beslay , Letters to Louise, 17'

• Orson Gauthier-Villars , About Love, 14'

• Charlyne Genoud , Next Stop Fontenay, 23'

• Maéna Hirt , My little Nono, 13'

• Robin Kaufmann , Madame Favre's, 23'

• Vincent Nguyen , Basile dreams of a spider, 15'

• Mathys Nouspikel , Lorena, 18'

• Pauline Pichard , The panther, my Oasis, 23'