Stéphane Breton

Mégantic is inspired by the events that occurred during the Lac-Mégantic rail tragedy in 2013. This fiction follows the destinies of Méganticois marked by bereavement and trauma, but also by solidarity, courage and heroism.

A collection of six documentary films featuring various locations and cultures of the world, screened at the Musée du Quai Branly from 18-23 May.

They are just 20 years old and are fighting against the Islamic State in the Syrian Kurdish regions. In a region of the world where women normally have to walk three steps behind men, the fact that they are under arms together with their brothers is of particular significance. Their colorful scarves and their courage have made them famous.

At the end of the road lies a track, the very last, a track swamped with the mud of a Siberian autumn, and at the end of this track lies a vast, dark forest which secretes those who have made this their final refuge, in hamlets that fray a little more with every passing day, sapped by misery and alcohol. We have to travel as far as we can, and be prepared to fall into the ditch, to see what makes us human.

Focused on his neighbours, Le Ciel dans un jardin continues the conversation, begun with the previous film, which is imbued with melancholy in the face of the impossibility of returning. This future mourning gives a particular colour to his observation, a combination of indifference (the repetition of the days governed by the principle of subsistence) and acuity (the contemplation of small things and of lost moments). The value of the shots finds itself enhanced, from the tactile close-up that captures the elementary actions—cultivating, eating, smoking—to the widest frame, espousing with a final gaze the frontiers of world that is about to be incorporated by the filmmaker as an interior landscape, a mental object. - Emmanuel Chicon

Shot behind the scenes, from the point of view of a subjective camera, the film shows the ethnologist’s ambiguous relations and negotiations with the people of his village in the mountains.

A poetic stroll that doubles as a lilliputian ethnography and Lilliputian ethnography, filmed downstairs in the streets of Paris. It's a kind of Eux et moi in reverse, with the filmmaker directing his camera his camera to the people of his village, whom he observes through the deceptively candid eyes of a distant friend, unaware of the city and the crowd, to whom he addresses himself pretending to wonder about things that are so simple that they seem endowed with a secret life.

Shot like a western without a gun, at a drunkard’s distance, the film takes place in New Mexico among an ancient Spanish community eaten to rack and ruin by rust, beer, and dust storms.

Russian people are passing before us during an endless train journey in winter. We lose ourselves in their speeches, gestures, faces, eyes. Anecdotes turn into admissions. Memory invades the compartment and seizes the empty spaces of the present. The train continues through the snow, cold and grey fog… An infinite film existing somewhere between the ephemeral and the eternal.

Filmed during the Kirghiz summer pastures in the Tian Shan Mountains, the film describes the quarrels of shepherds living in the same tent as well as the solitude of the filmmaker, in their midst but lost in thought.

On a stretch of desert coastline in northern Chile where it never rains, seaweed collectors live on a shoestring and live life to the fullest, in shacks surrounded by garbage cans and driving rickety cars. A happy vision of the simplicity of the world.

In a small valley in Nepal, at the end of a path worn out by so many feet and so many centuries, two old shepherds escape fromt their village to climb the mountains: shit everywhere, purity of heart, bedazzlement.

A documentary with black-white imagery taken in West Papua (Indonesia).