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Each year, hundreds of aspiring filmmakers from across France congregate in an auditorium in Paris to take the first of three rounds of the highly competitive admission exam to La Fémis, France’s leading film school. In Le Concours, master documentarian Claire Simon follows each step of the process, from that auditorium full of young hopefuls gathered to write a sequence analysis that will serve as the first test of their eligibility to the group photo of the forty candidates ultimately selected. Along the way, Simon shows us the exam’s practical stage— prospective directors direct a scene, screenwriters pitch a story, designers show sketches—and the oral examinations in which candidates having reached the final round face a jury of sometimes illustrious professionals. While Le Concours is full of suspense, comedy, and human drama, it is also a cutting work of institutional ethnography: in capturing the juries’ deliberations, Simon, a former professor at La Fémis, exposes the process of gatekeeping at an elite institution, one that intrinsically favors those with certain sociocultural backgrounds, leading to the extreme lack of diversity 

reflected in that group photo of future students.