Anton Bialas

A short tale of power, utopia, and madness, seen through the figure of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Two Senegalese men walk through a forest in Morocco at night. As they try to find a passageway to the north, they talk about a strange dream. Two officers from the Spanish Civil Guard patrol the Spanish coast in an SUV. The car's headlights probe the darkness in search of illegal immigrants. In Paris, a young woman performs a symbolic burial in a forest on the edge of the city.

A History of Darkness summons the figures of Nero, Dante, the Marquis de Sade and Ludwig II in the intoxication of their obsessions, between ecstasy and damnation, fascination and repulsion. A family portrait teetering on the edge of the abyss.

In the heart of a french village in 2020, five individuals united under the name ‘The Blackbird Group’, wander in silence in their house and prepare themselves for an extreme symbolic action.

From day to night, Otello, a construction worker and former tailor, moves between a sprawling Parisian construction site and a rundown nightclub on the brink of bankruptcy.

Behind our eyes, is a look into three lonesome characters. There is Patrick, living outside, in the parks, the gardens, crossing the city, filling his eyes with sunlight so that once night falls he will have enough and just enough. There is Aliasare, wandering between his blue room and the outside world, spending his days painting and filling the gap that separates him from the others. And lastly, there is Hadrian, a young blind man running through a forest in search of a lost sensation.

Two men meet around a camera: the old man recounts a lost love to the young director. To remember this love, the old man reads his texts, one of which alludes to a place that holds special memories: Ostend. The director then summons a third man and in turn creates the pictures of a lost love, in a shift towards fiction.

Three characters in search of poetic and liberating breaches in a gradually authoritarian Paris, on the verge of implosion. Each in their own way, crafts a situation, where, alternately, a sense of lightness can be found, suffocated screams can uprise and reality be distorted into new horizons.

A cinematic record by Anton Bialas and Ferdinand Gouzon of some twenty of Pommereulle’s sculptures.