In Fillols, as in many villages in the French countryside, for a few days in summer each year, the rural exodus seems not to have taken place. Everyone returns for the annual festival, to take a few days and nights away from the ordinary life together. So-called documentary cinema has filmed this type of festival a lot. But where most films are content to document, that is to say, to run in vain after the festival and its energy, Festa Major makes it the subject of a glorification of life. Of life as it passes on faces, in looks, gestures, outbursts of voice, as it constitutes the beauty of each and the community of all. "I film the life that we try to live by crossing it as we walk in a dream". This program, stated at the opening, is that of Jean-Baptiste Alazard since La Buissonnière (FID 2013). The secret of its success has not changed: the brilliance of natural light, the sharpness of the frames, the liveliness of the editing, the music of the colours. In other words, a poetics of 16 mm as a transfiguration of reality. What changes here is the scale of the poetic operation, its anthropological and political scope. "Life unfolds and winds": everything in Festa Major works towards this conversion of the line into a circle. The celebration is this conversion: the gyratory movement of the dance, the circularity of the seasons, the maintenance and conservation of forms, of gestures, in the passage of the years. Festa Major , a film-celebration, praises the cycle, the return: an ancient topos to which the worsening storm of progress, the acceleration of the speed of destruction of forms of life and the accumulation of ruins gives an ever more political, paradoxically revolutionary meaning. Between medieval Occitan gesture (troubadour prosody, lights and colors of stained glass) and lovingly parodic reprise of Debord (his melancholic praise of friendship), Festa Major celebrates the marriage of cinema and life. In full glory. Cyril Neyrat