Blind students take the camera in Éric Baudelaire's For the Moon
The cameras for a new film premiering in New York this week were held by five blind and partly sighted students in Paris.
For the Moon (Car la Lune, 2026), by multidisciplinary artist Éric Baudelaire, will have its world premiere, its first public screening, on 7 and 8 October at the 64th New York Film Festival in New York Columbia University. It is a documentary.
The film unfolds from the points of view of five students at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, a school for blind young people. Baudelaire gave each student a Sony Handycam to shoot with. Some are fully blind. Others are severely visually impaired The Art Newspaper.
The footage they gathered was then assembled with editor Claire Atherton. Atherton is the longtime collaborator of filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Film at Lincoln Center in New York, the organisation that runs the festival, describes the result as an improvisatory collaboration with the students Film at Lincoln Center.
It plays in Currents, one of the festival's dedicated sections. Baudelaire has been to the festival before. His earlier Un film dramatique screened as part of the 2019 edition, listed as NYFF57.
The US distributor Cinema Guild has acquired North American distribution rights, the licence to release the film in the United States and Canada, ahead of the premiere Variety.
What makes this stand out is the swap in roles. The students are not only being filmed. They do the filming, and the story is told through what they choose to record.
