Ekiem Barbier
Directing
Biography
Born in Toulouse in 1993, Ekiem Barbier is a writer, filmmaker, and musician. In 2012, he directed and composed the music for several fiction and animated short films. He then entered the Montpellier School of Fine Arts. In 2015, he joined the In Extremis collective, with which he contributed to several exhibitions. He obtained his Higher Diploma in Fine Arts (DNSEP) in 2017. That same year, he began taking an interest in documentary filmmaking and directed Anent, shot in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as well as Marlowe Drive, in collaboration with Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’helgoualc’h. He continues his research with a particular focus on a sensitive dimension of anthropology and experimentation, through a poetic and digital gaze. Ekiem currently lives and works in Marseille.
Known For
Somewhere on the internet is a land where communities pretend to live out a survivalist fiction. The avatars of the directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours there, creating a fascinating film resulting from their encounter with these communities. The “players” reveal their fears and fantasies, in an at times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual.
Knit's Island
Barnabé, a museum guard, discovers that a strange phenomenon seems to be erasing paintings by "pixelating" them. Wanting to alert his superiors, he meets Bertille, an art student and intern in the museum's restoration workshop. Together, they will try to understand this mysterious phenomenon that makes the paintings disappear behind a fog of pixels.
Ce que regardent les statues
Ekiem Barbier and Guilhem Causse offer a unique experience to Victor Assié, a young actor questioning the meaning of his profession: to explore an online simulation of daily life as an avatar and meet its users, while playing his own role. Through his complicated but hilarious peregrinations, he discovers a new yet familiar world.
In Real Life
Marlowe Drive is an experimental film that explores the field of video games as a context for making a documentary. A director, Adam Kesher, from David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive, lands in another fictional Los Angeles.
Marlowe Drive
Lost in the midst of a universal internet, visitors wander through a virtual museum, dressed in bizarre avatars. In this psychedelic-tinged documentary, it is through the perplexed gaze of a fish who arrived there by chance while surfing the internet that the directors lift the veil on the visitors' imaginations and their intimate vision of art and museum space.