The Small World (Le Petit Monde)
Benjamin Poumey | 2020 | Switzerland | 112
“Leave the child the time and space to live his childhood” is the motto of La Madeleine des Enfants, a daycare nursery in downtown Geneva. Everyday, from 7am to 7pm, more than a hundred children are accompanied towards individual autonomy and collective life by a team of fifty professionals. A year of immersion behind these stone walls to explore how the first steps in society are made, how this small world reflects and reacts to the fast evolving one outside, how a whole institution struggles to leave children the space and time to live their childhood.
World Premiere
Producer: Benjamin Poumey
Cinematography: Séverine Barde, Raphaël Frauenfelder, Erika Irmler, Nicolas Wagnières, Julien Roby
Sound: Masaki Hatsui, Nicolas, Martin Stricker, Charles Menger
Editing: Damián Plandolit
Sound Mixing: Martin Stricker
Director Biography
Benjamin Poumey studied filmmaking and theater at Bordeaux III University, while working with various theatrical companies. In 2001 he started work for Quo Vadis Cinéma in Paris, where he takes his first steps in film production. Settled in Geneva in 2006, he starts working for C-Side Productions (then still known as Perceuse Productions Image), a company created in the 90’s by artists emerging from the alternative scene. With an inclination for Cinéma Direct, Essay forms and bold experiments, he develops and produces documentaries selected, and sometimes even awarded, at festivals worldwide like the recent Hotel Jugoslavija by Nicolas Wagnières (Sao Paulo Mostra, Berlinale, TIDF, Thessaloniki, etc.) and Baracoa by Pablo Briones & The Moving Picture Boys (Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Locarno, FIDBA, etc.). In between projects as a producer, he likes to conduct personal experiments with Super 8 film and also just completed The Small World, his first feature doc as director.
