Pascale Thirode

Île flottante is not an island, nor a dessert, but a somewhat unusual cinema, floating, that's for sure! While in his booth, a young projectionist, nervous about launching his first screening, panics a little, at the entrance to the building, whose contours are difficult to make out in the foggy night, a queue forms, resembling a huge centipede of impatient people.

Impressed by Benny Lévy's teaching, which he had attended for several years at Paris-VII, Jackie Berroyer quickly came to the conclusion that it was necessary to keep a record of it. To do so, he suggested filming one of his seminars. This was no easy task: Benny Lévy was wary of images, preferring words and the patient study of texts, and feared that the intrusion of cameras would profoundly alter the teaching relationship – a discreet, dense and intimate relationship. Berroyer eventually overcame his resistance and asked Pascale Thirode to produce the film. The result is Benny Lévy, traces of a teaching, which presents selected moments from the 1996 course on Plato's Alcibiades, considered an introductory dialogue to his thinking.

An in-depth investigation into the double crime of the Papin sisters, which made headlines in the early 1930s and has fascinated readers ever since. Claude Ventura returns to the circumstances of the savage murder of their boss by the Papin sisters, which occurred in Le Mans on February 2, 1933. This case fascinated Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as much as Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan.

The film traces Sirima's path to her tragic fate. Sirima, a 24-year-old French-Sri Lankan singer, was stabbed to death by her partner on the night of 6–7 December 1989, just weeks after the release of her debut album, A Part of Me. Sirima's voice left a lasting impression on the passengers of the Chatelet-Les Halles metro station who heard her singing while she was busking there. The metro was her first stage and her first audience. Her voice and her personality inspired a professional musician, saxophonist Philippe Delettrez, whom she came to trust. Together, they composed, wrote and recorded an album at Davout Studio with great musicians and a symphony orchestra. Everything happened very quickly.

War wounds body and soul : it divides a country, Yugoslavia, it splits families. A Serbian family with six children, who had been living in France for thirty years, went back to Belgrade while one of the daughters, Astrid, chose to stay in France. Fifteen months later the father and mother with one of their sons, come to spend a few days in Paris. The brother and sister meet again before what will be a new painful separation.

"You will marry the land, my son !", is the order that a peasant mother could have given her son. The son is called Loulou, he is 40 years old and has been living alone in the farm he inherited from his parents, since their death. His pals, his work, Aurore, his confidante, who lives in the same village as him, are his comforts. However, celibacy seems to him to be his only option, his fate.

While the man in the street rarely dares to go into an art gallery, often located in the chic parts of big cities, he more easily crosses the threshold of galleries where pictures are framed. This is another type of gallery, with a less intimidating front and above all where the prices are affordable. Indeed, in these "accessible" places, you can buy a figurative painting for a moderate price, (between one thousand and ten thousand francs maximum) without knowing anything about either painting or the art market but simply because you fall in love with it. This trade has given birth to a prosperous market which produces and distributes mainly landscapes, landscapes of Provence or Brittany.

"I am coming out of seven years of a life that I truly believed was meant to be. I had room and board. I grew seven years older. For the rest, it's absolutely as I'd always dreamed it. There was not an object we bought together. Not a neighborhood where we lived together. No house, rent, bed by the wall, concierge. Not a line, a note, a word in his writings about me. Did I exist? If he were to leave tomorrow. I'd have nothing (September 1939)." Brive, Hotel Terminus. The two ghosts I am pursuing slept here a few nights... Sixty years later, I wanted to sleep here too. Room 15 another room, another hotel... in November 1942, they came through here without leaving any more of a trace than I will her whole life in a suitcase. The suitcase in which the paper woman slept then exchanged hands until it virtually became mine for a few months."

Synopsis by director Pascale Thirode: “I am Corsican through my mother, who never shared her story or the island’s history. She seems to have forgotten her origins. A few years ago, I found a photo album with removed photos and scattered captions, which became clues for a journey with my daughters, aged 10 and 13. We arrived by ship, approached the island in mist, and docked in Bastia, my mother’s hometown. We sought her father, who died in Ajaccio in July 1944 under mysterious circumstances. Navigating mystery and doubt, we faced the unease of an unpassed story, symbolised by the Corsican expression ‘Acqua in bocca,’ meaning ‘water in the mouth,’ which silences speech.”

A name : Taouss Zahira, at the bottom of a letter mailed in Settat, Maroc. 
A date : 24 January 1990. 
Recipient : Charles Bordes, living in Montpellier with his family since the exile of the Pieds Noirs (name given to French nationals born in Algeria) in 1962. He hid the letter in his safe-deposit box at the bank. 
Upon his death, the letter surfaced, provoking quite a stir in the family. Why did Charles not destroy the letter, carrying his secret to the grave?
Who is the person who signed the letter?

In 1998 a regular exchange of video letters was launched between a group of pupils in their fourth year at the Collège Georges Rouault in the 19th arrondissement in Paris. At the outset the video letters had been seen as an exclusively preventive experience. It was a much more important and fundamental experience : the discovery of the refreshing power of words. Words that had time to be constructed without being felt, both in school and in prison, as a trap (which is often the case). Little by little, the pupils and the prisoners took care of the recording of their video letters themselves. Following the example of the words, the images are raw, seeking themselves. But they are also borne by a rare tension, sensitivity, fragility. These are the images and the sounds which, two years later, we decided to organise into a film. To show an experience which also has to be closed by giving the protagonists a chance to speak one more time.

The last journey of the postal workers, a profession disappears... Men sorting mail on the Paris-Brest line, every night, as the train rolls along. Upon arrival in the early morning, the mail is ready for delivery. It is the last journey, the end of a job, the end of a way of life for these men who sometimes lead double lives, in Paris and in Brest...