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.

In Koha wa Tapaha, we hear the voice of the main character as she tells her story, but we don’t see her. What was your intent behind this choice?  
There are two reasons. One was a creative choice and the second out of a solution to an obstacle imposed on us. Creatively, this choice was made to make her story every Afghan’s story by overlaying her voice with the visuals of civilians. After the Soviet invasion in the late 70s, half of Afghanistan’s pre-war population was lost to death, injuries and displacement. One way or the other, directly or indirectly, everyone we see in this film has been affected by that war. Secondly, when the Taliban retook Kabul, their very first ban was on women’s participation in fiction cinema. They were barred from acting in films. For me, this meant overcoming one more obstacle in the world of filmmaking. To work around this ban, I decided we do not see her.  

How did you work with Fereshta Afshar, the voice performer?  
The actual collaboration was very different for both of us. We collaborated remotely. It was something neither of us had done in the past. Keeping segregation laws in mind, and to avoid trouble with the authorities, we never met during the making of this film. I sent her the narration script with notes for directions. She would then record the voice over and send me the files. I would listen and give her feedback. We went back and forth countless times before we both were satisfied with the final results. I had collaborated with Fereshta in my previous narrative short film Bad Omen, which also played at Clermont-Ferrand in 2021. She is by far the best acting talent in Afghanistan. For Koha wa Tapaha, I had made up my mind from the beginning that I will be working with her again in order to keep this film as authentic as possible and to keep Afghan cinema alive by collaborating with someone who was directly affected by the ban. It would have been a lot easier to cast someone outside Afghanistan but that would fail to bring the raw emotions that Fereshta delivered via her voice.  

It’s rather rare, for an occidental audience, to see images of Afghanistan that aren’t related to war. How did you choose the shots of the country you used in the film?
Afghanistan is always on my mind and in my heart. The exact reason I made this film was the fact that one night, I came to the realization that there was no active war in Afghanistan post the US withdrawal. It was the first time in my life that the armed conflict had ended back home. But, I am also aware of the history. Last time, an invading superpower “Soviet Union” was forced to withdraw; Afghanistan fell into a very bloody civil war in which Kabul, the capital was destroyed. I couldn’t help but have a mix of negative and positive thoughts about the future. These thoughts made me realize how historically significant the current phase is. I rushed to visually document Kabul’s residents, hills and mountains to preserve the current phase for future generations. I don’t know what lies ahead for Afghans and the country, but at least these visuals will mean something to someone like me in the future. Choosing the shots was easy. Kabul and pretty much the entire of Afghanistan is shaped like a poetic painting. When you stand in the middle of it, you’re surrounded by the hills and mountains. 

How would you like the audience to react to your film?
I find myself morally obligated to inform and educate the audience about Afghans, and Afghanistan through my films. I like to give the audience glimpses into the unseen and unknown Afghanistan, this is why I base my films around the events that have been taking place in Afghanistan post-1970s. Unfortunately, back home has been the battlefield for the world’s superpower forever. If you say the word Afghanistan or read the word Afghanistan, the first thought that comes to mind is most likely war, but there was and still is more to Afghanistan and its people. Our stories have been told with a narrow gaze. Filmmaking allows me to preserve our stories in an artistic form while at the same time, I am able to inform the broader audience of what Afghanistan was like before these wars or why we are in the current state. We all have our own biases shaped by the information we are exposed to. I can’t control how the audience will or will not react to my film, but I do know that they will have a new perspective and better understanding of Afghanistan after watching my film. 

What’s your favourite short?
My favourite short film is an animation called Father and Daughter by Michaël Dudok de Wit. It’s a very straight forward simple story about a girl who grows up, but within her, there is always a deep longing for her missing father. It’s a very powerful emotionally moving film.  

What does the Festival mean to you?  
Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival is an undisputed King of short film festivals. The programming, networking, opportunities and all-around environment are second to none. I look forward to being there in person soon. 

Koha wa Tapaha [Hills and Mountains] is being shown as part of the International Competition I3.  

Who inspired these characters for you? What did you want to explore through their relationship?
Arthur: The main source of inspiration was my brother, who is deaf. In our family, he is the only deaf person. He went through all of his schooling with deaf children and learned sign language with them. Apart from my mother a little, nobody in our family made the effort to learn sign language, including me. My brother always had to adapt to us rather than the other way around. This created a somewhat ambivalent relationship with his own deafness, it is part of his identity while at the same time trying not to let it show. The two characters, Gary and Tom, embody this ambivalence, between the extroverted father for whom deafness is not addressed, and the introverted son who is ashamed of it.

How did the casting go?
Marianne: From the beginning of the project, we knew that we were not going to have a hearing actor play a deaf character, a question that was often asked of us. Filming deaf people is at the heart of the film. There is a huge lack of representation of the deaf in cinema, especially in films where deafness is not the main subject. So we placed a casting ad in deaf and hard-of-hearing associations, and we were struck by Geoffroy and Louis. What was important was to find two people who have a relationship with their deafness similar to what they were going to have to play.

Arthur: What was surprising to observe was the way in which Louis and Geoffroy’s relationship, Tom and Gary in the film, evolved in the mirror image of that of the characters.

How was the shooting? In particular along the highway… 
Arthur: We thought it would be especially complicated to shoot at a highway rest stop, particularly for the sound. But Raphael Bigaud, the sound engineer, quickly reassured us on this point. In the end, we even recreated the ambiance of a highway during the mix. As for the direction, Marianne and I really wanted to leave a lot of room for improvisation. We imagined leaving Geoffroy and Louis wandering around the rest stop and filming them as they made their encounters. Of course, for safety reasons, this was impossible. But we still managed to leave some room for freedom during the shoot for moments of improvisation, some of which made it into the final edit.

Can you tell us more about your collaboration?
Marianne: Writing as a duo is extremely stimulating. Even on projects that we write on our own, we constantly exchange ideas. The collaboration that took us from the script to the film was our meeting with Laure Van Vlasselaer, our producer, at the very beginning of the writing process. Her interest and feedback on what we were writing allowed us to maintain the energy needed to complete a first film.

What are your respective paths as filmmakers?
Marianne: During my geography studies, I programmed short films for a Bordeaux-based association festival, which introduced me to the Agence du Court Métrage, where I started working in distribution. I then went to Clermont-Ferrand for the first time and fell into the film industry!

Arthur: I completed a film degree after my high school diploma in Paris 8, then tried to get into film school without success. In 2017, I self-produced a short film, Une place, which got me started.

What are your upcoming projects?
Arthur: I have two short film projects. One is a bittersweet comedy about a boy who pretends to be a drug dealer to make a friend, the other is a biting comedy about the place of the ego in the self-help industry. Finally, I am co-writing a mini-series project with Céline Novel about a group of children on a campsite.

Marianne: I will soon be shooting a sound project between documentary and fiction on “the healing story,” an immersion in an ethics committee within the public hospital system. I am also writing a docu-fiction short film that was inspired by the shooting of Tom veut rentrer about an amateur actress who is a bit lost on a professional shoot.

A 2022 film highlight?
Marianne: Rien à foutre by Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre.

Arthur: Il buco by Michelangelo Frammartino.

What’s your favourite short?      
Marianne: There are so many, but seeing Braquer Poitiers by Claude Schmitz together in the Cocteau theater several years ago really made an impact on me.
Arthur:  Emmanuel Marre’s Le Film de l’été is also a reference for our film.

What does the Festival mean to you?  
Marianne: I have been coming for about ten years, and I still remember the emotion that some lab sessions left me with, where I discovered the diversity of short films.

Arthur: To have the first screening of our first film here is a dream come true!

Tom veut rentrer [Tom Wants Home] is being shown as part of National Competition F12.

Could you explain what the acronym PLSTC represents?  
PLSTC is an invented acronym that simply means “plastic.” This word has several advantages: it is succinct, legible, and phonetically understandable in most languages. Also, with its “visually missing” letters, it also perhaps illustrates the idea that plastic does not totally disintegrate but rather, remains, in spite of everything, plastic.  

Which techniques did you use to create these images?  
No animals were harmed during filming, because there was no filming. PLSTC is 99% a mixed-media digital fiction. It is the result of an experimental process involving a symbiosis between human sensitivity and digital tools, certain of which use artificial intelligence (AI) applied to artistic forms. First, the images were created with the help of Midjourney, a text2image AI software that uses prompts to generate unique still images. I had to create a collection of several thousand images representing approximately 40 animal and plant species in order to select the 400 most precise, touching, and visually coherent ones for the film. Once these images were manually edited in 2D using Photoshop, I transformed them into 3D scenes with a depth maps generator tool which also relies on AI. Then, I again manually touched up the individual shots to ensure their visual credibility once in movement. After enlarging each shot to 4K, with the help of another specialized AI software designed for this purpose, I was able to begin editing and compositing the film with traditional postproduction softwares such Premiere and After Effects.  
What about the remaining 1% that is not digital?  The particles and microbubbles are, for their part, real.

How long did you work beforehand to produce the 1 minute and 15 seconds of images for the film? Did you encounter any roadblocks along the way?
Indeed, the film is relatively short, but intense, with its almost 400 visual effects shots. Aside from a few glitches of certain newer AI apps, everything went according to plan and rather quickly compared to say, a classic CGI production that would have included as many animated elements. The entire PLSTC project took me 3 months. I made the film itself in 2 months: from the concept to the color calibration to the creation of the visual images, transforming them to 3D, followed by the editing and finally the VFX compositing. After that, I spent a week on sound design with Magnus Monfeldt and then Nick Smith who crafted a 5.1 surround mix. And finally, it took three more weeks to put everything related to the film’s launch in place—the film description, PR, translations, website, teasers, posters, key visuals and other communication material in specific formats to promote the film on social media, lists of festivals, etc.) 

How did you choose the piece of music that accompanies the film?  
Very simply, very quickly, and very early on in the process, by carrying out specific searches on music library platforms. I already had a precise idea of what I wanted as far as rhythm, length, genre and instrumentals went. I quickly came across the piece of music that corresponded with what I was looking for and that immediately struck me.  

How interested are you in the question of raising awareness about protecting the environment? Do you have other projects on the same topic?
The issues regarding the environment are more and more concerning to me. But I am not a sailor, nor a scientist, nor am I a lawyer at the European Commission. My weapons are my sensitivity, my creativity and my artistic skill. If my messages are able to reach people capable of making changes in real life, I feel that I’ve fulfilled my role: that of communicating through art. Each person is free to get involved in their own way. As far as I am concerned, in addition to having spent a trimester self-producing this film, I will give 20% of any profits earned by PLSTC to NGOs on the field. My next projects also deal with universal causes and I’m exploring new AI programs to perhaps help me make them. 

What’s your favourite short?  
There are many of course, but I’ll cite the first and the last that had an impact on me: La Jetée by Chris Marker and A Short Story by Bi Gan. But I hope to discover many others during this edition of the Clermont-Ferrand festival!  

What does the Festival mean to you?  
I learned about the festival relatively late, only about ten years ago, when one of my first animated films, Miss Daisy Cutter, was officially selected for the festival. I was struck by the how large the event was, here in the middle of France, as well as by the enthusiasm and the passion of the audience and the organizers. The Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival is for me a wonderful experience and an example—like Cannes or Annecy for animated films—of the best out there to nourish the passion and satisfy the curiosity for cinema all across France.  

PLSTC is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L5.  

How did the inspiration come about for Will You Look at Me? How much of the footage did you shoot on purpose? Did you work on the soliloquy first or after selecting footage?
After I returned to China from New York during the pandemic, I bought a super 8mm camera. I brought it with me everywhere I went, filming people around me without a precise intention in mind. The filming process lasted for almost a year, on and off. I was leading a nomadic life, migrating between different cities and film sets in Beijing, Shanghai, and my hometown Wenzhou. After a few months of drifting elsewhere, it was always a fresh experience to come back to my hometown. To dive once more into my parents’ life and roll the camera, to then embark on a new nomadic cycle where later on I would have the celluloid developed in a lab in Beijing and scanned into digital files. Then after another while, I would return to my hometown again. It was like the film was coming into its own shape. During the Chinese New Year in 2021, my mother and I had an unexpected conversation that switched my film’s narrative. It was the first time that my mother and I spent time with each other after a long period of absence since I had always been unconsciously avoiding facing our relationship. During that conversation, I looked at my mother for the first time in years. I saw deep fears and pains in her eyes where my language and words failed to be reached, where, I realized at that moment, film could be my answer. That’s when this film started to come about. It felt fresh and natural for me to find texts out of the montage of images. And vice versa, texts that grew out of images breathed new possibilities into the creation of images. Therefore, I kept filming during the writing and editing. Everything grows naturally. It was an everlasting process of questioning and exposing myself through cinema. It felt like diving into an honest conversation within myself and taking a long swim into my memory, searching for the roughest truth, which hurts but also heals. 

Are you interested in depicting LGBTQI+ issues specifically or did it come to the film just because reality sets in?
This film came out of my need to discuss my truth with my family, as my letter to my mother. I never had the thought of depicting LGBTQ+ issues specifically. Maybe it’s because I was in it, the materials were too close to myself.

Were you more interested in the question of coming out to parents or in the issue of secrets kept silent outside of the close family circle?
I am more interested in secrets kept silent inside of the close family circle, how we live so closely yet at the same time so far away. 

What’s your favourite short?
Heaven Is Still Far Away  by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.  

What does the Festival mean to you?
A celebration!

Will You Look at Me is being shown as part the Lab Competition L5. 

Can you tell us more about the choice of title?
Last four years in deep Brazil we were bombarded by robots of far-right movements, financed by the same economic agents that destroy nature and kill people with social vulnerability. By triggering fake news, they create a collective delirium and social vigilance to try to suffocate any expression of resistance. Ainda Restarão Robôs Nas Ruas Do Interior Profundo (There Will Still Be Robots on the Streets of the Deep Interior, in free translation) is a metaphorical expression, almost a prophecy, to say that the spirit of fascism will still be on the streets of Brazilian countryside, even with the recent return of democracy, and the film tries to express that the Brazilian youth working class is united and aware.

How familiar are you with that marginal world?
I’m from Assis, the small town where the film was produced but spent eight years in São Paulo’s capital where I was a music reporter that covered the Brazilian hip-hop scene. My connection with the marginal world came from this. In 2014 I came back to Assis for developing films and find themes that could reflect my real origins. There I found the invisible world of the countryside cities margins, poor places where farm workers like my ancestors have been pushed after the mechanization of their jobs. The peripheral Santa Clara neighborhood where we filmed and where the screenwriter Daniel Rone lives is one of those places. Although I come from a middle-class background, I’m experiencing the contradictions of the territory where I live, and I feel connected to this marginal world through a filmmaking process that reflects on what should be more latent in our sensibility as a society.

How have recent political events impacted people living on the margins like these in your experience?
The last four years are very hard for us Brazilians, especially for the marginal people. Our policy even was racist, but in the last four years, they had a president who authorized racial violence. We even were a very unequal society, but last year we saw the hungry come back on the streets, we saw a very aggressive deregulation of the work that made the youth accept precarious jobs, without any social guarantee, or just surrender to the crime opportunities. Today, on the margins of little countryside towns, the guys who came from the field, work for Ifood or crime, and their moms and fathers are working by cleaning the rich people’s houses, building them new mansions or taking care of their security. But those marginal people won the last election, not the middle class, so I think we are rising our class conscience, and that is just the beginning.

What did you want to explore by telling us their story?
The place where I live, like a large part of the Brazilian countryside, had never had a film production before. So firstly, I and my team wanted to create a window so the people of this place could see themselves on screen and reflects on its reality. After that, we wanted to show the world the invisible part of our country, and say that we have a lot of cinematographic stories that had never been filmed before. We just need opportunities.

How did you find shooting with a horse?
The film screenplay was developed based on real stories of the Santa Clara neighborhood. A young boy called Luquinha, who comes from the field to live in the city margins, bought a horse on OLX (e-commerce platform), but it’s always on the run. The horse’s name is Morena, and Luquinha had take care of it during the film production. Even in the downtown scene, Morena was very calm.

What sorts of stories and themes do you like to work with as a filmmaker?
Nine years ago I left the big city to make films in the countryside. Since then, I’ve been looking for narratives of this invisible world and its peripheries.

What’s your favourite short?
Sideral by Carlos Segundo.

What does the Festival mean to you?
More than me, it’s an important recognition for all the friends who are walking together against the wind and making films in the interior of São Paulo. This film is the result of a very collective process. We are organized into an audiovisual cooperative that brings together 27 filmmakers and producers, the Oeste Cooperativa Audiovisual, project manager. It’s our first fiction film, and being in the international competition of the biggest short film festival in the world is a sign that we are on the right track. We’re delighted.

Ainda Restarão Robôs Nas Ruas Do Interior Profundo is being shown as part of the International Competition I1.