Editing
People's associations with flora goes back a long way, taking us back to our own roots as well as to new ways of life and creative potential that reveal themselves as we deal with plants.
What story is hidden in the stranded suitcase full of pictures, sounds and letters whose origins we do not know? The film is an homage to cinema, a film poem made up of images between dream and reality; a network of sounds, text fragments and voices that leads far out into the world and at the same time close to us. Aren’t we all floating islands?
In May of 1982 Julio Cortázar, the Argentinean writer and his companion in life, Carol Dunlop set out in their VW bus on a journey along the highway from Paris to Marseille that, for each of them, was to be their final one. Twenty-five years later, Océane Madelaine and Jocelyn Bonnerave set out to undertake the journey again.
The path to Yusef Lateef was a journey into the unknown. We were aware that he is one of the great maestros of jazz and one of the last of his generation still alive. In an era of black culture that probably found its strongest form of expression in music, he was a contemporary and companion of those musicians who helped to shape and renew jazz: John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley. Now, at the age of 84, Yusef Lateef lives withdrawn in his house in the woods somewhere in New England – in a room full of musical instruments. He still plays his saxophone today, as he has done for most of his life. (Humbert & Penzel)
The highway, revisited. Years later. Transformation of a locale. A place of mobility that, in the meantime, has become a place of silence.
From January to November 2004, as a kind of carnet de voyage alongside our other activities, we asked one and the same question of various people we met on our journeys, including friends: "Do you remember a moment in your life when something really changed?" We requested them to tell us a story to illustrate their reply, and we filmed them.
A film that ressembles a dream. Shot over a period of several years, it is composed of fragments of memory and moments of life woven together to create a sequence of microscopic stories. “Vagabonding Images” is a film that plays with the forms of cinematic language inspired by the poetic collage techniques of the French Surrealists and Japanese Haiku poets.
An African backyard, the stage of life. Rhythms rise up from everywhere, interweave with one another. It is a daily dance of gestures and sounds that has something eternal. The music of life is omnipresent and leads us to the heart of Africa.
Author and activist Milo Yellow Hair (Oglala Lakota) is one of the most important intellectual voices of the American Indian resistance movement. Born in 1950 and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation, he has dedicated himself to the struggle for the recognition and survival of indigenous cultures. We spent an afternoon asking him questions on the theme of memory and cultural identity. Memories are not what has passed, but are the cutting edge between past and present. Never before has so much information been saved and forgotten at the same time. What happens when we lose the memory of our heritage? Is it preserved in collective memory and made accessible in the challenges of the future?
Johann le Guillerm, the tightrope walker who had become one of the main characters in Middle of the Moment, decided to found a new circus and called it “Cirque Ici.” In the fall of 1997, we visited him on the first European tour of his solo circus performance and shot with him for three days and nights.
"To make a film means to invent a music of pictures, sounds and rhythms; means to compose visual values, that have no equivalents in other art forms," wrote Marcel L’Herbier in the thirties. To plumb the possibilities that lie within the film material itself is what, for me, accounts for the meaning as well as the desire to work in film. Film as the disclosure of a fantastic world which the spectator can dive into and, ideally, have his imagination kindled. ONG DONG DREOKA is a game with images, a carousel that turns, a magic spell, a memory, for adults, of childhood." -Simone Fürbringer
