Cécile Canut is a sociolinguist and filmmaker, seconded to the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) from 2022 to 2027. A member of CERLIS (UMR 8070), she teaches at the University of Paris in the Department of Language Sciences. She initially focused her research on linguistic imaginaries in Africa (Mali) and the staging of migration (in Cape Verde). As head of the ANR Miprimo (La migration prise aux mots) research program, she has edited and contributed to more than fifteen publications on migration experiences in Africa and Europe.
She is currently interested in practices of discrimination against Roma people (Bulgaria and France) for 20 years. Advocating for anthropological linguistics in the wake of linguistic anthropology (Silverstein, Gal, Irvine, Agha), she defends a situated approach to research. Her publications include Provincialiser la langue, langage et colonialisme, published by Amsterdam in 2021; Langue, Anamosa, in 2021; Le langage, une pratique sociale, Élément d’une sociolinguistique politique in 2018 (with Manon Him-Aquilli, Felix Danos, and Caroline Panis at PUFC); Mise en scène des Roms en Bulgarie, Petites manipulations médiatiques ordinaires in 2016, published by Petra (in collaboration with Stefka Stefanova and Gueorgui Jetchev).
Cécile Canut has been making documentary films for some fifteen years, working closely with the people she meets. She has traveled to many countries and lived in Mali, Cape Verde, and Bulgaria. Making films with people rather than about them, she believes, means living with them for a long time and embarking on a process of collective construction where power relations are never repressed, but always produce new cinematic arrangements and new political subjectivities. In Nadezhda (Bulgaria), she began a collective project—with author Stefka Stefanova Nikolova and her family—that has continued for more than 15 years. Her goal is both to offer a subjective vision of the places filmed and to work on renewing cinematic forms by integrating a political reflection on the place of the researcher. She is currently working with S. S. Nikolova on editing the seven episodes of the series “Nadezhda” (Hope) resulting from this long shoot.
From this work, they are currently working on the editing of a full-length film (1 hour 30 minutes) entitled Between nights between days, which will be released in June 2026.