Directing
Love letters never sent. A miniature ship that never sailed. Papers rolled in its veils. A voice emerging from the sea around it.
A film straight from the lab. The landscapes are the supports for tests of curves.
At the end of the Middle Ages, in Florence, Italy, a revolt of the poorest textile workers, the Ciompi, upsets the city and succeeds in overthrowing the government. In Florence, I film in their footsteps to bring out the ghosts of this revolt. In the industrial suburbs, I discover the echoes in the present, in the modern textile factories where immigrant workers are exploited. In Paris, I dialogue with the militant researcher who made the history of the revolt. Together we question the political stakes of writing history in the construction of a fertile collective memory.
In the open intimacy of public gardens, men and women talk about their stories of love and sex, helping draw a cartography of what one can reveal about one's way of loving, of the norms, and of the taboos that limit speech.
Saint-Nazaire, the shipyards. Tiny little men on gigantic machines, boats that will sail away: between the workers' every day life, the sailors' experience and the dream of seeing the world, how can imagination still have a place in an industrial world?
Four motifs of an insular landscape: dunes, grass, stormy skies, sea. These motifs are inflected and intertwined through various photochemical operations: successive printing generations, flat printing, bipacking, and chemical toning; unsettling the steady, desolate shots to create an imaginary landscape where elements and matter meet.
