Olivier Dury

1993 French sitcom created by Jean-Luc Azoulay.

Michel is a funny boy, a kind of intellectual. With Pauline, a very beautiful girl he met on the beach, they are going to get naked and discuss surrealism, sincerely and without trickery. But who are they really?

Denis Lavant reads long passages from Luis Buñuel's semi-autobiographical "My Last Sigh". From this text, without film excerpts, Laurence Garret travels in the footsteps of Buñuel, from Calanda to Zaragoza, Madrid to Toledo, Spain to Mexico.

French poet Thierry Metz killed himself in 1997. He'd moved to the country with his wife and 3 kids but after the youngest is struck dead by a car, the sensitive artist sinks into depression and alcohol, leading to time in a facility.

Théo, Lucie, Louisette, Hervé or Benjamin find themselves for months in the Charcot pavilion, in the psychiatric center of Cadillac. Through their exchanges and the way they inhabit the daily life, they express the ordeal of confinement as well as the fantasy that animates them. Their painful or comical escapes invite us to go beyond the walls that imprison them.

Sous le ciel by Olivier Dury collects with a striking spirit of accuracy the images and the sounds of what disappears in accelerated before our eyes, the water, the air, the virgin spaces. But without catastrophism, neither fury, nor melancholy, far from the sad passions. On the contrary, Under the skydeploys an ode to the energy of nature: the energy of all things, from the most volatile, a bubble, to the most mineral, a rock wall; energy in the diversity of its forms, from the most intangible, lights and breaths, to the most spectacular, torrents of fire; the energy in its states and textures so well extended by the composition of Martin Wheeler, the kineticism of the rustling winds, the spring of balance, the power of a monumental rest.

A short film by Olivier Dury

One image, in particular, is likely to haunt viewers: that of many men huddled together on the back of a truck. The men are headed northward, from Niger to the coast of Algeria. Just how long they will be travelling depends on countless unknowns. And once they’ve reached the African coast of the Mediterranean, they’ll still be far from their goal, for it is only then that their dangerous attempt to cross the sea to Europe begins. Theirs is a journey in hopes of a better life – one that frequently ends in death.

High in the mountains of the Pamirs lies Lake Bulunkul and the village of the same name, one of the coldest inhabited places in the former Soviet Union. Mountains, a plain, a herd of yaks. Time has seemingly stood still here. Survival in this inhospitable landscape indeed depends on sensitivity to weather fluctuations and changes in nature.