How did you come up with the idea for Hors-saison ?
The story comes from my own experiences; it resonates with my first professional experience in audiovisual work. I had just finished film school when I found a fulltime job as cameraman in a production company in Corsica. The job meant I could earn a living when we were right in the midst of a social crisis. The production company specialized in producing entertainment and travel magazines, with the aim of selling illusions to viewers. My responsibilities consisted of producing streams of images, scouring areas by the seaside or in the mountains looking for panoramic views and people who were happy to live in those places. The company’s management techniques were dehumanizing, with no space to share perspectives. The producers operated by orders over the phone or through email to complete projects. I gradually slipped into a pre-formatted professional cycle with no creative elements. By making limp, slick images like postcards all the time, I was caught in a process of disappearing. And after a few years, I was able to break out of that confinement.

How did you go about choosing the locations? 
Like the main character, I’ve been over those desert landscapes looking for panoramic images for a production company. So I had already located them and I chose to keep them for my film. The landscapes are important because they point to the character’s interiority. They induce a void, a loneliness and silence, as Edward Hopper’s paintings often do.

Why were you interested in the question of the loss of meaning? Do you see yourself making other films on the topic?
What interests me is understanding the way that a loss of meaning can lead to existential crisis. In the film, the character’s professional and personal spheres intersect. He wonders about the meaning of his life, about the basis for his choices and his position. In this case, his existential crisis urges him to make some changes. An existential crisis is not an illness as such. It can even have positive effects because it forces you to look at all areas of your life and redefine your priorities and desires. In other words, it leads a person to move in a direction that’s more adapted to their needs. We can agree that most of the time, people don’t choose what happens to them. But they themselves can determine the relationship they’ll have with particular circumstances and thus influence the shape of their life. It’s political in that sense. I’m currently writing a feature film with characters who must deal with the fact that their lives have lost meaning. And their space to navigate remains risky.

How did you work with the light?
Working on the light was a responsibility I shared with Aurélien Py, my director of photography. Beforehand we had agreed to integrate the light and intensity of the color into the creative process of the film. I’d say that in my work, light corresponds with the composition of pictorial space. Hors-saison begins in the natural, warm light of a day illuminating the landscape. The further the character moves in his existential journey, the darker the atmosphere gets. The light follows the character as the day gradually wanes from daylight to half-light to night. It dissolves in the loneliness and emptiness that is eating at him.

What’s your favorite short?
If I have to pick one, it would be Nest by Hlynur Palmason. The director manages to pull off the remarkable feat of creating a fiction film that seems like a documentary on the subject of the inner workings of his family. Using a fixed shot throughout the film, he lets us in on the movement of the poetic world of the passing of the seasons that wraps the characters in their setting. That open window onto a breath-takingly lighted, intimate landscape, examines our relationship to time. The treatment is brilliant.

What does the Festival mean to you? 
When I was a film student, I saw the Festival as a sort of holy grail for short films. Not just me; this demanding event held an overwhelming place in the minds of everyone in my class. Now, in my mind, the Clermont-Ferrand Festival exists as a symbol of freedom of expression for artists and as a meeting place, far from standardized forms of thought.

Hors-saison [Off-season]  is being shown as part of the National Competition F1.