Dinner with Ce n’est qu’après

Interview with Vincent Pouplard, director of Ce n’est qu’après [Only After]

When you started making the film, did you specifically want to work with young adults, or was the age of the witnesses simply a consequence of the topic that interested you or of your approach in handling the topic?
I wanted to work with young adults, with young people who had difficulties and who demonstrated a maturity that we rarely think them capable of. For years, I’ve been working with the department of legal protection for the young and social assistance for children as part of film workshops. I’ve met a good number of young people like them, that we generally assume have scant creative abilities and who have little space to express the complexity of their paths and their relationship to the world. Most often, when we hear about them, it’s in sensationalist articles and reports where their voices are altered and their faces are blurred. It’s like the media disembodies them, like they don’t truly exist. Going against that presentation of them was one of the driving forces behind the film.

Why did you not want to say anything about or enquire into the causes of the suffering that each of the witnesses mentions?
Because recounting violence categorizes people too quickly for my taste. It’s “showy” and that type of spectacle would have impeded what I wanted the film to talk about. Our ears stop at that type of information and pay little attention to what comes after. Their transfer, the suspended state they’re in, wouldn’t have been at the film’s center. This was a way of putting the emphasis on what they say rather than on what they’ve been subjected to or subject others to. And thereby to bypass some received ideas.

Why were you interested in the prints and casts?
In the film four teenagers talk about themselves. It’s a “film-print” of their identities under construction. I invited them to participate in an experiment with me and to try to say who they were. I was obviously interested by the “material” depiction of the experiment, I’d tested it out in the past. But the introspective side was even more important to me. For about forty-five minutes, they were cut off from the world, plunged deep into themselves, and I conducted the vast majority of the recorded interviews just after the “unmoulding”. I used the experience as a springboard to the sound recordings, a way of reaching them privately.

Why did you choose to show the scenes of the witnesses walking, alone onscreen and from behind?
The idea was actually pretty simple: it offered a reverse angle to the scenes of the casts being made. Mentally imagining what they’re going through and for as long as possible delaying revealing their faces and their “birth” on screen.

Do you see yourself making other films about the end of adolescence?
Yes. I’m currently working on a new film, a feature-length documentary where the main characters are teenagers living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Have you discovered any advantages that the short film form offers?
For its relatively light production side, the short form definitely lets you undertake radical structures and test them out. That was certainly the case with this film.

Which works did you draw from?
That question has always been a mystery for me. I build off of fragments of works (not only cinematic works) as well as of moments of life.

Ce n’est qu’après [Only After] is part of National Competition F11.