“Young, French and Forgotten” programme
This forgotten, often raw young generation haunts the French films we received this year like a cry for help. The three short films in the program cloak the young in mythological garb that reappropriates the real, transforming it, as well as rejecting and desecrating it!
Amidst this individual and collective disillusion, hope takes on different forms:
– On his own, facing a future that’s already written, on his own to shatter social determinism, Théophane withdraws into his own personal apocalypse in Réponses au brouillard (Answers to the Fog).
– Together, Charlotte and Jérémie are a couple with a hunting rifle, beckoning both death and love in Saint Désir (Saint Desire).
– A gang of friends, Laurent, Trash, Gaël and Benjamin, wander through suburban landscapes of shopping mall parking lots creating their own ritual in Nirvana.
Youth rumbles silently in these three films, and will take center stage during the open forum with the directors on Sunday 5 February following the screening in the Frères Lumière room at 4pm.
“Spring 2016. We would walk around Guingamp, in Brittany. We wanted get a grip on the times. Gloom, empty streets and little hope, all we talked about was abstract youth.
We met Théophane who was twenty and didn’t say much. He was a skinhead with disarming eyes. So we tossed our scripts and we looked at things through his eyes. Making the landscapes shine in a France that we didn’t want to look at anymore. And we dreamed with him about the distance between what we could see and what we felt was coming. As if the future was meeting the present, coming to antagonize it and spit in its face. A common space where gazes meet and, through the fog, sketch the outlines of a concrete youth that is waiting and hoping, in anger.”
François Hebert & Olivier Strauss.
“Nirvana is the story of a friendship, with all of my friends. A few years ago, we were all twenty and we laughed all the time. We finished school, some of us went straight to work, others didn’t, and some gave up everything. Nirvana is elsewhere, the journey to something new that marks the end of an era. I wanted to tell the story of all that. The film talks about nostalgia, longing, passion, depression and love. Many other generations have faced the same things, but this is mine, and this is how I talk about them.”
Lucas Doméjean.
“The French young people of today are beautiful. They think straight, they are not afraid to be who they are. French young people are an emergency because they are the future but that future offers more guns than love. Illumination can come from various sources, in the film Saint Désir it comes from the sun.”
“Growing up in France: rage – anger – sleepless nights – recognition – existence – choice – love – youth is what comes before you get old! – so what are we waiting for, light the fire!”
Caroline Detournay & Paulina Pisarek.
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