Shorts

In the wilderness, a tree begins to question whether it may actually be a man tripping on hallucinogens. How did you come up with the idea for Man or Tree? It is based on a true story – the real-life experience of a friend, who had an intense salvia trip and had become convinced that he had lived the life of a tree for hundreds of years. Towards the end of the trip, he pulled his roots out of the ground, only to find himself, standing up, snapping out of his trip, and realizing he’s (…)

An unknown force pushes a man to a place of extraordinary characteristics in the high Arctic. In its limits, is where he may find the answer. Between an introspective adventure and the poetry of the absurd. How much are you related to absurdism? Not much really, or at least consciously. It usually interests me whenever there is a conflict between meanings, or when these are created by confronting apparently very different subjects. In the film everything is connected under some kind of (…)

A seemingly ordinary day in the life of Quentin, a Parisian film-lover. After going to the cinema twice, he runs into a former college friend, listens to a girls’ conversation in a bar, then goes and meet his best friend, has a beer, and ends up spending the evening in the Parc Montsouris, where he meets Lise. What were the circumstances of you writing the script for À l’ombre l’après-midi? I wrote most of the script at the end of 2020, during the second lockdown. It had been rattling (…)

Adel, a desperate jobless father, gets out on the streets of Beirut hoping for change. Can you tell us more about the conditions that have led your protagonist to take action? When you are the only breadwinner in your family and you have to provide them with food and the most basic needs of life, pay the school tuition fees, the rent and the bills. Then you find yourself jobless without any income, you start feeling useless and obliged to take action. That’s the case of Adel, a 42 (…)

Ada goes swimming in the Icelandic sea and reflects on raising a child in a country that feels nothing like home. As she enters the freezing water, she relives her traumatic pregnancy. Soon her swimming eases. Facing her fears is helping her heal. Has animation always been an area of interest to you? I’ve always loved animation, as a child of course, but also as a grown up. It’s such a beautiful and fascinating process. But it hasn’t been part of my practice until On the Surface. It’s my (…)

A couple rushes out of a glamorous party. On their way home, an argument leads to a brutal car accident. When George regains consciousness, Christina has disappeared. He will then experience a real descent into hell. Where did you get the idea for the couple in the film? The story in the film is based largely on my personal life. It’s coated over by the animation, the genre, the film’s atmosphere, all that… But the story is still pretty autobiographical. How would you describe your (…)

Concertina is an interlocking narrative film that jumps between parallel realities as two sets of brothers discuss their dreams of one another. The film explores themes of ecology, family, and labor using magical realism as a narrative device to create dark, ethereal worlds that offer a glimpse into the power of the physical realm over our collective psyche. Why were you interested into brotherhood? Do you have further projects in mind on this theme? I was interested in brotherhood (…)

In the French Jura mountains, at the end of fictitious Middle Ages, Else is an herbalist and a midwife. With Nicole, her young apprentice, they are disturbed during their daily practice: a stranger riding a horse demands to gather all the women of the village in its small church. Why did you choose to use the Middle Ages to tell this story? And why set it in the Jura mountains? The Middle Ages is a very broad historical period, and is sometimes very caricatured. In the film, I depict the (…)

During the 2005 French riots, four young students from the banlieu on the outskirts of Paris hear about an old urban legend: that of Paupaul, the rapist of the woods, who would attack young people from poor neighborhoods to keep them away from rich ones. As the All Saints’ Day vacations loom, they set themselves a challenge: to go through the woods to check out the existence of the legend. Why did you choose to set the story during the 2005 riots? It wasn’t so much a choice as a desire (…)

Filmmaker Steven Fraser lives with prosopagnosia, otherwise known as ‘face blindness’, which means he can’t remember or recognize faces. In this film he uses animation to convey what this means to him. How did you get to know prosopagnosia? Several years ago, I was going through the diagnosis process for autism. At this time, I was speaking to different doctors and specialists who asked my many questions on how I interact with people. During this time, they realised it was a possibility (…)