Edition 2023
The return of the Festival, March 21-25, 2023
For its 13th edition, the Festival International du Film d'Archéologie de Nyon (FIFAN) celebrated its return to the big screen, after a period of confinement that forced us to go online in 2021. In 2023, the festival returns to its original vocation of enabling the public to meet the specialists: archaeologists, researchers and film-makers. This new edition is all about conviviality and exchange.
The week opened with a tribute to the centenary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. The first film examined and reinterpreted the pharaoh's funerary panoply. It lifted the veil on many grey areas, including the origin of this exceptionally rich treasure. A presentation by Amandine Marshall looked back at the successive looting of this tomb during Antiquity, well before its discovery by Howard Carter in 1922.
Egypt was also in the spotlight during the evening dedicated to Swiss archaeology, with a film devoted to research on mummified bodies by a team from the University of Basel. The Swiss archaeology evening also took us on a tour of research in Ticino, and then onto the question of palafittes with the film Memoirs from across the lake3D projection, followed by a conference on the protection of these invisible vestiges.
News often catches up with archaeology, which finds itself held hostage by political issues. This theme was addressed by the first film, Le serment de Cyriaque, about the rescue of artifacts from the Aleppo Museum in Syria. The screening ended with a behind-the-scenes discussion on the making and distribution of the film. For its part, the film Sheol presented the excavation of the Sobibor Nazi extermination center in Poland. In the absence of archives, only archaeology is now able to gather material evidence of this recent past, on the verge of oblivion. The film was followed by a discussion.
The films selected were designed to take viewers on a journey through time, from prehistory to the modern era, and across lands from Samarkand to Rome. Finally, as archaeology is above all a discipline of passionate men and women, portraits of exceptional researchers were shown in tribute to those who have dedicated their lives to research.
We were delighted to see so many of you at this 2023 edition!
CHRISTOPHE GOUMAND
Festival Director
