TRAILERS

INTENTION

I played over and over with the thresholds in this film… For the picture, I relentlessly crossed and crisscrossed the threshold where at some point there is an image, a succession of images, a photograph, a sequence of a movie… The passages are multiple… I think I exhausted the question…
Similarly, for the sound composition, I tried to locate the threshold where what were just erratic sounds are now turned into a piece of music, because a rhythm, a melody have eventually emerged or pads and notes… Still, regarding the sound work, I didn't want to cross the threshold, I did titillate it again and again, in various ways, but I managed to remain beneath or before… Meaning, sounds are not reduced to notes and if they happen to repeat themselves, they don't establish a rhythm, not yet. They keep the complexity of their qualities, their sincerity until the very end, where I indeed allude to the acousmatic music.
Likewise with the text, as I went after this continuous, transitional threshold, where, you have, here, words, ideas, impressions and there a text, a piece of poetry, etc… Yet, at the end, a meticulously written text comes to dispute what has been previously exchanged…
The picture, sound composition and text proceed independently… Yet, they respond to each other again and again… This echoing of the text by the sound or of the picture by the text, etc. is also a set of thresholds and passages between those different mediums…
The philosophical and political question it raises is quite basic: At what point art, as a language, gathers and documents; at what point what is documented is organized, stressed, emphasized, to present it and make it intelligible; at what point the organization trumps the rest? It also has to do with passages… And I do enjoy the fact that some raw material, barely gathered, comes to dialog with quite organized elements in the sound, the picture, the text and between each other in order to exhaust the question…
But I want to make clear that those circulations, as relentless and multiple as they are, remain discreet… At first glance, the movie is quite simple… That is very important… I wouldn't say humble or spare, that'd be too strong… But yes, that's what I had in mind when I was navigating the making of the movie, that's why, for instance, I chose not to cross the threshold of music, because that would have been way too… I don't know the word here either… Say, not simple.
I don't know if this very gesture of letting things follow their course, without intervening, using or preying on them is already decolonial and ecological.

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Winter Sun from Claude Pérès.

EXCERPTS OF DIALOGUE

- I notice that the French youth of migrant background often refers to white people as "the French"… somehow implying that they are themselves less French… That is heartbreaking to me.
- Yes, we say "vous, les céfrans", indeed.
- Well, I think it is telling on the level of racism and segregation in the country that you are led to believe that you are…
- The only times I do feel French is when I'm abroad… The first time someone told me "you, the French" was in Germany.
- How did that make you feel?
- I don't know… That I had to embrace a heritage that is questionable…

- You can tell that someone lives here by the satellite dishes.

- Is it a kind of revenge for you to fuck with white people or a way to, I don't know, assimilate?
- I told you already you ask really inappropriate questions.
- I would understand the revenge aspect, but you're too kind, it would work if you were to be very, I don't know, rough…
- You wouldn't understand the assimilation aspect, then?
- Yes, I would, of course.
- I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe. It might be there somewhere… I think I used to be attracted only to white people because they were the only references or examples I had growing up. It is as simple as that.

- How do you tell a cantaloupe is ripe?
- It must feel very heavy in the hand and the stem should be fully detached.
- And how do you choose a horn pepper?
- You should check the tip. It rots from the tip.