Éléonore Saintagnan

Éléonore is driving west when her car breaks down in the middle of Brittany, France. She rents a bungalow there in a campground with a view of the lake, in which, it is said, lives a legendary beast. From mobile home to mobile home, she observes the present, summons the past and lets herself be invaded by fiction.

At the Franco-Belgian border, the fox population has increased in an extraordinary way. In Brussels, the green ring-necked parakeet has colonized the city parks. In Colombia, hippos imported from Africa now living in the wild, terrorizing the population. These animals have been moved from their natural habitat by humans and reproduce at a fast pace, raising ambivalent reactions in the host environment.

At the tip of Brittany, the island of Ouessant—a grassy heathland swept by sea winds—is the last land before America. Given its geographical situation, it is a place that opens wide the doors of imagination. A Girl from Ouessant is an invented and, at the same time very documented, cartography of the island. This methodical statement starts as the diary of Éléonore Saintagnan, the resident artist-filmmaker at the Créac’h semaphore station, an ideal site for observing the surrounding area. Then, the account shifts towards a playful mise en scène, peopled with sailors’ wives, kelp burners, stories of little black sheep or countless shipwrecks… Drawing on the regional archives filmed in black and white dating from a time when the island lived mainly from fishing, the game begins.