Vincent Dieutre

The dawn of the 20th century: L’Apollonide, a luxurious and traditional brothel in Paris, is living its last days. In this closed world, where some men fall in love and others become viciously harmful, the women share their secrets, their fears, their joys and their pains.

A filmmaker and his crew try to enter the passionate world of Port-Royal and of Jansenism. Another Age of Louis XIV comes to life, the age of Pascal, Racine and of the “Friends of Truth”. The film itself comes up against the unanswerable question of grace.

A young woman travels to Moscow, speaking with the people she meets of the region's recent past.

One is confined to Paris, the other to the countryside. One is a writer, the other a director. In the spring of 2020, both correspond with their phones. They film the real and film themselves in the test, during the epidemic. This crossing of time is a historical document, intimate and collective, funny and profound, shot in the urgency of the event. What to do with this “dead time”, this regained time?

The third, Sicilian, part of the “films of Europe” cycle, Orlando ferito Roland blessé is a multifaceted ‘chanson de geste’, marked by anxiety and irrigated by hope. Or two viatica: the testamentary document written by Pasolini not long before his death (Le vide du pouvoir en Italie), which metaphorically communicated his political despair about the “disappearance of the fireflies”, and that of Georges Didi-Huberman (2009), which, on the contrary, refers to their “survival”. Vincent Dieutre travels across the far south of Europe in search of today’s “fireflies” who invent a political life on a daily basis.

Vincent Dieutre explores his neighborhood of the Xth arrondissement and sprinkles his ride micro-stories of dredge and drugs.

One evening, a married young singer Zoha meets the French lawyer Mathieu in a night club in Beirut. Mathieu will become suspected of spying, while Zoha is trying to flee from her husband. Despite these problems, the two will witness a love story for few days mixed with violence and fear.

Its light, its smoky bars, its vacant land: the characters that we meet here treasure different aspects of Berlin. Vincent Dieutre puts faces and voices on some of the many artists who have settled there since the collapse of the Wall. Questioning each one about their arrival and possible departure, he depicts how Berlin has become part of the personal stories that have, in turn, been infused with a city’s history. What each artist recounts with their own words and sensitivity is also what the city has taught them – the vocabulary of the sentiments in German, the strength to live in the cold or in precarious conditions. Like a playful wink to the tourist guide format, the filmmaker travels from district to district.

Our feelings, our choices, even our death wander on the web like options, like ghosts. For the time of a last train journey, for the time of a love chat, a deadly chat, or an unlikely casting, three generations will try to definitively wrest from virtual nomadism, to put an end to self-exile that undo our lives... Between Rotterdam and Tourcoing, diving in the Flatlands, tenuous and fragile...

“My best friend, Anna, asked me if I would mind taking her fifteen-year-old son Itvan to Berlin with me. I accepted immediately.” An elegant, refined man in his forties sets off with Itvan on a long, enjoyable journey, his Winter Journey. They cross snowbound Germany by car. As the man drives the boy through cities and countryside, Itvan discovers the past and the vast job of reunification now underway. Poetry and culture are also part of the journey, which is accompanied by classical German music. When their paths cross with the man's former lovers or the journey provides unexpected encounters, Itvan also gets to know more about the man's own life. When they finally arrive in Berlin, their ways must part. Itvan watches the man leave, taking the melancholy of his existence with him. However their journey together has created an unbreakable tie between the two men. Itvan will never be the same again.

In September 2008, at the crack of dawn, a small film crew met in a house in Provence to give substance to a memory. During his childhood, whilst watching television, Vincent Dieutre heard Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine—created by Berthe Bovy with the Comédie française in 1930. He set out to find what so troubled him at the time in this “firestorm of words” and shot a “clandestine, feverish film” as an exercise in admiration as night falls.

A studio. A man and a woman. Moving images on the screen, which he comments on, spurred on by her questions. All the footage was shot from the window of a flat: views of the street, the metro line running above it, the canal, into the windows of the buildings opposite. The flat belongs to the man’s lover, the man is a guest, spending his nights there but never his days. By the canal, young men from Afghanistan set up makeshift shelters as the man looks on, developing increasing sympathy for them. The seasons change, winter, spring, summer.

One spring evening, Nino, a young writer of flamboyant, kitschy melos, finds himself catapulted into the nightclub of a city on the edge of the world. How did he end up there? Between two drinks, under the benevolent gaze of Rosa, a philosophical barmaid, and Al, a young customer, memories of his incredible evening gradually surface, like fragments of a love film that has yet to find its ending.

Road trips through Los Angeles, famous verses in the Poetry Lounge and love in times of the pandemic: Rendezvous with an old flame, fourty years later. After Jaurès (2012), Vincent Dieutre presents another tender autofictional piece in the Forum.

Chronicles of a male homosexual drug addict in 1980's in voice-over with long take scenes from Rome, television snippets of news of Gulf War and commercials.

The film-maker goes back to Bologna where he did a stay twenty years earlier. The ties of a patchy, lacunal and tragic memory begin to interweave the Italy of the “years of lead” and that of Berlusconi.

I am in Chicago for a festival but also to reflect, to know where I stand with the other. With the world too. There, everything that undermines our daily life is exacerbated; love, snow and oblivion, my letter is the chronicle of "this winter of love", the unstable record of this freezing of reality. Welcome to indifference.

Deeply influenced by Chantal Akerman's films, the director sets out to trace her footsteps in her hometown of Brussels, but also in his own approach to filmmaking. As he wanders through today's European capital, he is led to clarify his memories as a viewer, to confront his memory with that of other people who knew and loved her, or that of other artists who, like him, were shaped by her cinema and guided by her high standards. A meditation on the future of cinema, his investigation takes the form of a tender Brussels drift that gradually unfolds. An exercise in admiration, in search of Chantal A.

At the end of June in Paris: Mireille accompanies his friend Thomas, a solitary and restless being, during a walk to Père Lachaise. Thomas is very agitated, worried. He confides to Mireille that he wishes to be cremated in the event of death. In September: after a period of holidays, Mireille returns at her home. She and his friends do not any more manage to contact Thomas. After investigation, Mireille learns that Thomas died in August, only. As he has no family his body was interred in the square of the needy of the new cemetery of Thiais. Mireille wants to honor the last wills of his friend, but the law is strict: to dig up the body and cremate it, the services of the city hall have to have the signature of a member of Thomas's family. Mireille learns that Thomas had a younger brother, Melchior. But But the young man, marginalized, abandoned for years by his older brother, refuses to sign the licence to dig up.

“The Nineties had a pretty bad start”, this is how Vincent Dieutre introduces us to the shadows of his personal universe in those years going through Utrecht, Naples and Rome. In these three cities and two love affairs guide a homosexual man on his nightly search for lost beauty. In a cross between a diary and a baroque play the film reconstructs the fragments of a fateful journey against a Caravaggio backdrop. Painting, sensuality, losing oneself in a cityscape: the Leçons de ténèbres form an obscure fresco, a white-hot collage of trashy vanity.

Staying in the Argentinian capital, Vincent Dieutre compares his memories of a Buenos Aires magnified by the Argentinians in exile at the end of the 1970s, and with whom he associated, with what the city offers him today. His film rings out like an adieu to the fantasies of the past, while fulfilling a promise: the unfailing welcome reserved for the poetic powers of the present.