François Zabaleta

Valentin is a young man, convinced that Bruno, a married man he does not know, is the man of his life. He will do everything, absolutely everything, to convince him to fully live this love story.

Les envoûtés (The Bewitched) tells the story of the clash between two people who seem to have nothing in common, except the incurable obsession to live their madness of being as if each day were the last... A meeting between two beings who have consciously chosen the margins to inhabit the world in a way that belongs only to them.

These are the last months of a man's life. Quentin Debeaumont. Sixty-one years old. Famous and celebrated writer. He experiences a romantic and sexual passion such as he has never experienced with a sixty-six-year-old man, Pavel Radulescu, a worker of Romanian origin who became a business manager and a fan of Greco-Roman wrestling. At first, he refuses his advances. Whether he is bisexual or homosexual, the question is never resolved. He ends up accepting them but in an unusual, ritualized form.

The story takes place in the provinces in the 1970s. The narrator, Gaspard, a 17-year-old teenager, keeps a daily account in his diary of the homophobic harassment of which he is the victim. His tormentor is a student from his high school, Georgia. She is an emancipated girl who lives in a community with her brother Francis and his biker friends. In high school, Georgia does nothing. She is judged by the school administration as a delinquent seed, a sort of neo-Nazi amazon, an irredeemable sheep who spends her recesses smoking Craven A., drinking from her silver flask with suspicious contents and reading exclusively the novels of her favorite writer: Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

A love story in which the third character is a microphone. The other two characters, of course, are people who love each other. One is a man, the other too. The two have loved each other in secret for nineteen years. Yet they only see each other once a year, and only a few days, sometimes a few hours. In order for the miracle of shared feeling to continue, they develop virtual intimacy. Every night they talk to each other. Or rather, they take turns speaking. To address the loved one, he addresses a microphone.

Travelling Alone is a movie about men. More precisely, it's about what's absolutely left to be said, on the social and artistic levels, about male sexuality. Travelling Alone is a cinematographic meditation on men and their libidos. This film tells the story of a man who brutally finds himself confronted with the vicissitudes of his own desire. Little boys are not taught that their virility, their capacity for turgescence, may one day go bankrupt. What happens then? What happens when a man, still young, discovers that his best years are behind him? That his life, from then on, will be an endless work of mourning his access to sexual pleasure? Such is the topic of Travelling Alone: a man who searches his past to find the first signs of what was going to be his fate as an adult.

A man in his sixties recalls five relentless memories from his youth, all tied to his awakening sexual identity. Through these recollections, Devenir traces his painful passage into adulthood and entry into a society that rejects difference. The film explores how fear, shame, and internalized oppression shaped his sense of self, turning social hostility into a private wound. It becomes a journey into the world of the “Other,” revealing how living under constant threat transforms one’s inner life, yet ultimately contributes to the formation of identity.

At that time, we are in seventy-eight. I'm twenty years old. I'm in America, in San Francisco.

The story of a close friendship between Louise Rivière, a seventeen-year-old girl in love with the absolute, and one of her high school friends, Victor, who is two-year-old younger. For five years, Victor and Louise never left each other. For five years, night and day, he followed her until that morning in October 1982 when, without giving an explanation, Louise threw herself out of a window of a building in the Bronx, New York. Louise had a vocation, a utopia that will get the better of her: to become a jazz singer, like the one she revere above all else: Billie Holiday.

For a few months I investigated. I went to see sedentary people. I asked them to tell me about their life, about the schedule of their days. These are people who spend their lives at home. Whether they have to or not is not important. What matters here is how they cope with their lot what they do with it, don't do with it. How they find or do not find their salvation far from their neighbors.

The narrator, an eight-year-old boy, meets another boy a little older than him in his provincial town in May 1968. They will become buddies, then friends. Very quickly, an exclusive, insatiable, fusional, loving relationship develops between them, which will disintegrate, a few years later, following a betrayal. As time goes by, the pain becomes a phantom pain and this heartache will be lived by the narrator, now a teenager, as a rite of passage. A sentimental education.

In revenge for his wife who deceives him, Thomas belongs for a few months to an agency escort boys. He is paid to spend evenings with strangers. Keep them company Talk to them. Listen to them. Accompany them to the theater or in dinners. The meeting with Véronique, a fifty-one year old businesswoman, is going to upset her life forever.

"My husband and I are fifteen years apart. When I met him, I was twenty-one years old. He was thirty-five. For the people of our small town in the center of France, I am a whore. A gigolo. A self-serving little slut." Thus begins Cuisine bourgeoise, which evokes, through the story of social dinners he is forced to attend, the hell of contempt, condescension, and icy ostracism that the local bourgeoisie subjects the narrator of this film, a young homosexual of twenty-one, living in a couple with an older man, in the very small town on the banks of the Loire where his partner is a prominent notable.

The story of a man in his thirties who is possessed by a Toraja funerary statuette stolen by his companion in an Indonesian cemetery. This film, worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe tale, is the incredible but authentic account of a man who, although he does not believe in spirits or the afterlife, was, for more than ten years, the victim of the vengeful rage of a cult object.

It's not a story. Nothing happens. Literally, there are no characters. It's the story of an absence of story. The non-story of a mother and son, a non-mother and non-son, who never meet. They know each other. They socialize. But they don't meet. It's the story of a meeting that doesn't happen. A non-meeting that lasts a lifetime. There's the mother and the son. Two people who sometimes cross paths. When they are in each other's presence, they are not together. They don't know how to be together. They haven't learned to be. When they are in each other's presence, they wait for it to pass. It's not a mother and son. It's a man and a woman who find time long. They're here because it's supposed to be a mother's job to spend time with her son. It's a man and a woman waiting on a station platform for a train that's never coming.

Thomas, an eight-year-old boy, has just been told by his mother who his father is, an American soldier from Oklahoma, stationed in a barracks in Orleans, who has been back home for exactly eight years before he knew he was to become the father of a French child. At the end of 1963, Thomas and his mother flew to America for ten days to meet Richard Walker, his unknown father.

We are in 1979. In summer. In a small town of the deep Sologne. Caleb, a fifteen-year-old teenager with the physique of a Greek god, seduces Nadine, a forty-year-old librarian, out of idleness, by lying to her about his age and identity. Caleb has a brother, Estéban, who aspires to become a novelist. It is Estéban who directs his brother exactly as a film scriptwriter would. He instigates his brother's every move. He is the one who invents the twists and turns of this story of seduction that they both think has no consequences. Nadine, of course, falls in love with this young man whom she introduces to her husband Pierre who, in turn, is bewitched by the young man's charm.

The story of a meeting that should never have happened, between a domestic employee and a homosexual photographer twenty years younger than her. Their story, in an empty town in the center of France, lasts a whole Summer, a few years before year 2000. Every night, they pace up and down the streets of this town.

The idea is simple. I went to ask men and women of all ages and from all walks of life to pose for my camera, with their favorite object, with their Rosebud. By way of introduction I told them the following: Choose an object with which you have a special connection. A unique bond. Almost superstitious. An object that represents you. Who would be like your double. An object that participates in your identity. An object that talks about you like no one has ever talked about. An object when you are no longer there that will take the place of you. It doesn't matter what. Regardless of its price, its rating. It may or may not be a work of art. The main thing is the strength of the bond that unites you. Its truth.

This film is the portrait of a man who has had no luck in life. A man who never had a star, good or bad. This man was my father. What interested me, what motivated my desire to talk about him, is, paradoxically, because I did not know him. Because I know little about the adult man he was. And also because those close to him, his family and friends, only knew what he let them see. When he died one afternoon in August 1975, he was thirty-seven years old and he was starting to get better. He was starting to enjoy life again. That summer we were to spend together. We had to get to know each other. But chance, fate or providence decided otherwise. He was fishing at the edge of a pond. His line hit a high voltage line. His name was Michel. This film is his poetic tomb.