How did you come up with the idea for The Elevator?
The original idea came from a television news piece that talked about elevators being installed as part of building renovations in older neighborhoods. In May 2019, in a Starbucks in Beijing, I pitched the idea to Jing Su and Li Ge, the producers of my earlier film Day Dream. They found the topic very interesting and Jing told me about Gilles Porte’s interactive film Tantale that she’d seen at the Clermont-Ferrand Festival when there was an opportunity for interactivity on the topic. When François Serre came to present Tantale in China in November 2019, I showed him the drafts of my script. He liked the idea and we started developing and writing up the interactive elements, the situations, the characters, the voting rules, and so on… Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and China’s health regulations, we were only able to make a linear version of the story in two acts.

Why did you want to portray human relations in the context of neighborly interaction rather than in another context, such as the family or workplace? 
Initially, the script was centered on the father and son, and less on the neighborhood connections. But after we decided to make an interactive film, the interconnected human relations of the inhabitants of an apartment block rapidly came to the fore. There was more opportunity for subtlety and realism, and for the viewer, there are more occasions for empathy.

Why were you interested in the question of accessibility for people with disabilities? Do you see yourself making other films on the subject?
By nature, people only worry about themselves, or at most about their family. Indifference and contempt are ordinary human behaviors… From my perspective, the question of this “ordinariness” is even more pronounced in vulnerable groups (refugees, the infirm, people with disabilities, etc.), where it’s also possible to question the place of political choices. Even if the issue of disabilities is useful to the narrative, as a young Chinese person, the question of voting, of choice, of personal interest and general interest is more of a motivating factor to me. For example, the distribution of the Gilles Porte’s film Tantale in China, which I helped with, was incredibly political: having people vote during a film screening, having each viewer’s smartphone connected to the projection, having the choices be written by an artist. For the moment, with respect to the future, I really hope that being selected at the Clermont-Ferrand Festival allows us to motivate investors in making an interactive version of the film. Because even if we keep the film to the same 12-minute length, we have to produce over sixty minutes for the different possible versions.

How did you mold the character of the officer?
For us in this film, the officer represents the State, “public politics” and, in the best-case scenario, general interest. In each of the branches of our interactive script, the officer defines at least the rules of voting. And lastly, he’s the key character because you can imagine numerous aspects. For example, you can easily think of disinterest, authoritarianism and corruption. He’s actually a very easy character to mold since he’s present everyday in ordinary life.

Have you thought about showing further shared moments from the lives of these neighbors? 
Though we used the idea of “ordinary human contempt” as a narrative motor and a way to generate empathy over the course of the short film, the main topic is the expression of a choice, or more precisely the outcome of a vote. We’re exploring the types of vote presented in the film and that’s what organizes our “living together”. That’s one of the things that connects France and China. So we didn’t think it was necessary to show another “shared moment”. We stayed focused on how the neighbors feel concerned, make their arguments official and on accepting collective decisions.

What’s your favourite short?
For this film, I had two short films in mind: Gilles Porte’s interactive short Tantale, with respect to the interactive script and recording techniques necessary to make a film that doesn’t stop and that has one beginning and multiple ends. And Roland Denning’s short Everything We Know About for its clear presentation of the fact that what makes us up personally the most are our choices, and how our choices can be formatted and exploited. For example, “liking” something on Facebook or Instagram, which we see as an expression of free choice, lets Meta’s artificial intelligence know us thoroughly.

What does the Festival mean to you?
Being Chinese, it’s obvious that the Clermont-Ferrand Festival is a springboard for me. It’s a Festival that helps me envision my future in film.

The Elevator is being shown as part of the National Competition F9.

What did you want to explore through the relationship between Michel and Santos in the film?
Bellus follows Michel’s inner and spiritual journey. The film tells the story from the perspective of the young man. It is not a story of conversion, but of a winding path toward a form of redemption. Evangelical religion plays a very important role within the Gypsy community. Many former traffickers find meaning and balance through religion. Michel aspires to a better life and will fluctuate between a spiritual quest and the search for his “true self”. His relationship with Santos allowed me to underpin this journey but also to show that through their relationship and sometimes opposing lives, solidarity is the strength of this community.

Has your experience as a photographer helped you to be accepted by the community of Gypsies in the south of France?
In 2016, I wanted to photograph the pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer with the intention of feeling the religious force that brings together preachers from all over Europe, and that gathers Gypsy, Rom, Tzigane, and Manouche populations. I met Tino there, a Gypsy boxer from the Bellus neighborhood, near Perpignan, who offered to introduce me to this place. Without hesitation, I accepted his invitation. Fascinated by the unique identity of this community and touched by the warmth of its reception, I quickly felt the desire to repeat the experience. During my many stays, I became familiar with the culture that cradles this neighborhood. I found in the violence of their wounded history and their uprooted daily life an echo of my family history. As is common in these migrant populations, we find women and men who cling to strong traditions, doubled by an attachment to religion. This gave birth in me the desire to build a story from this theme, to draw a faithful portrait of this community, away from the stereotypes often associated with Gypsies. My experience as a photographer allowed me to discover this community, but not to be accepted by it. Only persistence and time allowed me to be accepted.

One of the successes of the film lies in the presence of the actors on screen. How did you work with them? Did you have a spontaneous and informal approach to the script, or rather a very written one?
The documentary aspect of this story is completely assumed: the sets are real and are an integral part of Michel and his community’s daily life, in order to capture an atmosphere that is unique to them. The actors are mostly family members of Michel Pubill. I wanted to involve the residents of the Bellus neighborhood so that they could interpret their own role as much as possible, such as Grandma Carmen, for example, who is actually Michel’s grandmother. The material of the script served as a basis from which they expressed themselves freely with their own expressions and dialects in order to paint a faithful portrait of this community. The dialogues for the different commissions we presented were heavily written, but there was a lot of spontaneity as well.

What’s your favorite short?
A film reference for my director of photography Hovig Hagopian and myself is A Ciambra by Jonas Carpignano. He shot a film in a Romani community in southern Italy with non-professional actors, starting with a short film before making this first feature film.

What does the Festival mean to you?
With my producers, we have been targeting the Clermont-Ferrand festival from the beginning, which represents for us a real stepping stone in the career of this film, and we are extremely proud to be selected.

Bellus is being shown as part of the National Competition F9. 

What interested you in the mother-daughter relationship?
Childhood bonding and its evolution through time, and the subtle elements that reveal that evolution.

Why did you want to work on the unfolding of time? Do you see yourself making other films on the subject?
As Kierkegaard said: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”. I think we determine ourselves and make our choices based on the conscious and unconscious memories that marked our childhood. I wanted to make use of time not as a narrative ruse but as a mirror that we can slip through. A time that’s neither present, past nor future. I’m interested in the subjects of time and losing one’s bearings.

Where did you film and how did you discover the location? Why did you choose it for this film?
I filmed in Brittany on a little island called Bréhat which is part of Côtes-d’Armor. I’ve known the place since I was a child and it’s deeply anchored in my imagination. It’s a place that evokes the fantastic and the tactile. It’s a powerful place outside time, with no cars and it’s still very untamed. 

How did you meet the actors?
I already knew their work as actors. I took a train to go and meet Mireille Perrier at her home. Seeing her in her own world, having lunch with her near the stove and then getting back on my train that evening. It was like visiting a member of my family. Meeting Robinson Stevenin also felt very much like family, getting together over a meal. Having a meal together really gives you a different sort of access to people, to their way of moving and carrying themselves. Moreover, each of them had a connection to Bréhat, so that was like a sign, an obvious choice.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you?
Abbas Kiarostami’s The Bread and Alley.

What’s your definition of a good film?
One that surprises me.

Where did the idea come from for making a film about illegal mining in Mongolia?
The origins of the film were an animated conversation we had with a Mongolian friend and drawings on a smartphone: a herder wearing traditional garb perched on a Honda, his yurt decked out with a satellite dish, dreaming of owning a drone to watch over his herd; we saw a certain harmony between digital culture and digital nomads, the real impact of global dematerialization on Mongolia. Both of us did our architecture degrees on areas of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. Lookin at questions of architecture and construction quickly revealed a very strong taboo: in Mongolia you do not dig up the Earth, so as not to harm it, or leave traces of your passing. Later we learned about the existence of ninjas, secret, illegal, Mongolian miners, who started popping up after the fall of the USSR (the Mongolian People’s Republic was a sister state of the Soviet Union). Since Mongolian land had been untouched for thousands of years, it poured out untapped mining resources: gold, silver charcoal, uranium… as well as rare earths and lithium used for making batteries and smartphones. The ninjas are often former herders who’ve lost everything because they’re unfamiliar with the new capitalist logic and the climatic, ecological and economic catastrophes it entails. Since they dig the earth, the ninjas are feared and considered pariahs by Mongolian society. And since the ninjas were asking us directly about our own relationship to our context, to the earth and the exploitation of resources, we wanted to make a film with them.

How important was it to make the film in a documentary style?
We developed the film as a fictional story but during shooting we were overcome by the reality of the experience and the people we’d met. We thought the material circumstances of the film contributed to being closer to the situations and people we were filming. There were four of us in the crew: Tseveen, the interpreter, Paul Guilhaume, the director of photography, and the two of us. The film, the script, the shoot and we along with them adapted to the routine of a family of wintering herders, to the pace of pastoral life, to the reality of Mongolian time and space, far from our tendency to cut them up and control them. We came up with new scenes during filming (and editing) and as a result the film may have taken on what you call “a documentary style”. What’s most important for us is to place our stories and arguments within an area without betraying it and revealing the experience of its complexities.

Why did you choose to use primarily still photos to illustrate your story?
A question of means, which we did not have, obliged us to rethink the form of our film. At the outset, we wanted to film in a more “conventional” way. We were already in Mongolia so we wouldn’t miss the winter and to prepare the film when we found out we’d have absolutely no financing. We had to find practical solutions to be able to make the film anyway. Now, at -30°C, the batteries for electronic equipment only last a few seconds and the yurts run on 12V car batteries, so we couldn’t recharge the camera batteries or unload the memory cards. Using film to shoot was also inconceivable so we decided to use analogue prints. We liked the idea of a Mongolian, pop version of La Jetée, and the fact that there were only four of us allowed us to journey to the North and the frozen Lake Khövsgöl and made filming considerably easier, which in turn made us all the more eager to film. We also really liked the idea of juxtaposing rough, still photos with the prying, godlike eye of a drone’s digital camera.

Where and how did you meet the Mongolian actors?
The actors you see in the film initially had to host the film crew in their camp, help us with vehicles and provide us with food and shelter in the Steppe. When we decided to use photos, we adapted the characters in the script to fit their styles and personalities.

Why did you want to include references to the Earth-Goddess Otukan?
The goddess Otukan is a character who appeared during editing. The change of form, to still images, led to the use of a voice-over and a completely different sound apparatus. Certain parts of the original story in the script became completely uninteresting, dysfunctional even. Through re-writing the text for that voice over and over, by the editing stage we wanted to give it a mythological dimension. The goddess allowed us to personify the Earth we were talking about and which all the other characters had an ambiguous or conflictual relationship with. The Goddess of the Earth exists in many civilizations, so we were able to pass from a specific geographic area to a more universal discourse. We were also curious about the goddess Otukan because the beliefs surrounding her gradually disappeared in favor of Tengri, the male god of the sky, which in a certain sense crystallized the passage from a gynocratic regime to an andocratic one.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you?
Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness.

What’s your definition of a good film?
That’s too difficult a question. 

Blanc Ninja is being shown as part of National Competition F9.

Was the choice to focus on the demonstration of 17 October 1961 generally agreed upon, or was it the subject of discussion within the group?
As we were discussing what sort of film we were going to make, Yanis proposed the idea of a film on that event. What struck him was that most of us had no idea about the event, even though it’s a piece of our country’s history. It quickly became obvious that we were going to tell that story, our own way, to inform as many people as possible who didn’t know about what had happened. Our discussions about the film immediately went off in the direction of the things we needed to put in place to tell the story (especially the technical side, because there’s a real issue in staging a diverse crowd), and we didn’t linger on the topic itself because we all had a common desire to broadcast the event to as many people as possible.

Why did you want to begin the film with framed-shots and cuts that give the impression of of archival images? Did you research how the events developed?
The first part of the film is meant to be convincing, and unbiased, and the dashboard camera was very handy because it immerses you in the demonstration and retraces the entire path of the Algerian workers. That also allowed us to work a lot on the sound, which immerses the viewer in our story so they relive and feel the intensity of what happened through the film. The film’s process retraces the path that was really taken the night of the demonstration, showing the key points in the city of Paris, as much for their aesthetic value as for the image they send. We wanted to be as faithful as possible to the process of the events, the likeness of the surroundings, and the actions that were taken that night, so that was where we directed our research. 

How did you achieve the colours in the film?
We based the film’s colours on certain cinematic models, Amélie for example, so that the colours accentuate the atmosphere, which changes over the course of the film: warm colours evoke the end of the day at the beginning of the demonstration; nighttime on the Place Saint-Michel punctuated by the sirens of the police vans intensifies the danger of the actions taking place; the opposition of colour underwater that has the colours of the past and future collide with the second, more festive, part of the film that singles out our main character, and also the stadium with its projectors and bright colours that bring joy and melancholy.

Why did you want to include laughter and festivities?
By choosing to make a stylized film, we had already decided not to talk about things head on. In showing things factually in the first part, we wanted to surprise the viewer in the second with a disconnect between what they might be expecting and what we offered up: we tell the same story but in a parallel world that’s meant to be festive and based on living together. The opposition between the violence of the demonstration and the joy and softness of the party, accompanied by Ibrahim Maalouf’s sublime trumpet, allows us to lead the viewer towards possibly reevaluating the event.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you?
As we were making our film, we discovered Bastien Dubois’ Souvenir souvenir which deals with topics similar to our film. It was very interesting to see how he handled the subject and be able to discuss it with him.

What’s your definition of a good film? 
Making a film is a power that opens up all possibilities. There are a million ways to tell stories, and just as many techniques and means for making them. For us, making a film means creating something that reflects us, talking about something that we hold dear: if the creator likes their own film, then it’s a good film; everything else depends on how each person will perceive it.

Les Larmes de la Seine [Seine’s Tears] is being shown as part of National Competition F9.

What gave you the urge to tell Shana’s story? Are some of the characters drawn from examples or experiences you have had in real life?
I’ve wanted to tell Shana’s story since meeting the actress who plays her, Eva Huaut. I’ve known her since childhood and I’d lost touch with her for 7 years. When we met again, she was 20 and had been through things in her life that were unimaginable to me. I wanted to shoot her daily life, her voluntarism, and the hard time she had getting out of a toxic relationship. The surrounding characters are inspired from the people that she hung out with during that stage of her life.

Why did you choose this title?
Le roi David goes back to the copy of a painting that was in her mother’s house when she was a child. David is also the name of the lover she struggles to forget. Her mother and her boyfriend are the two irreconcilable things she is in conflict with. I wanted the presence of this man to weigh on her throughout the film despite the fact that we never see him and the film is not about him. This omnipresence is felt even in the title of the film, which carries the name of this absent person. He is her obsession.

How did casting take place?
For casting, there are people from Eva’s circle who play in the film. Her friend Sarah, her aunt. For some of the roles, her friends withdrew and we had to find replacements. At that moment, Eva met Anaïs and introduced me to her. We met Charlène and Willy during scouting in Drancy… I offered a role in the film to a friend of mine, Sekouba Doukouré, and he took care of a large part of the casting. He introduced us to a lot of young people from Labec, a collective in the 20th arrondissement in Paris, a laboratory of creation and expression. For Shana’s mother, I thought of one of my friend’s aunts, who has a very strong presence and who had fun playing the role.

How did you work with the actors? Is there an element of improvisation?
I wrote the script with dialogues from the stories that Eva had told me. Then I worked with the actors who improvised and made the text their own. These improvisations were recorded by my assistant Charlotte Buenomo. Then, I rewrote the dialogues based on the recordings, choosing the things I liked.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you?
Herman Slobbe – L’Enfant Aveugle 2 by Johan van der Keuken. I saw it during my documentary direction studies at Lussas, and before that, I had not seen that many documentaries. I told myself: OK, I can also make films of a personal, subjective and unrestricted nature, and on a small budget. That helped me decide how to proceed from then on.

What’s your definition of a good film?
A good film is a film that surprises me. I have very eclectic taste, but I think that is what all the films I like have in common.

Le roi David is being shown as part of National Competition F9.