Letter from a Filmmaker to His Daughter

Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels' meditation on dream, travel and film.

In Violin Fase, Eric Pauwels twirls the camera around the body of dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Through this process, Pauwels creates a new relationship between camera and dancer, but also between body and dance, dance and cinema. Consisting of a geometrical and minimalist choreographic structure filmed in four uninterrupted takes, the artist’s camera captures a woman dedicated to exploring the boundaries of physical exhaustion.

A film made of objects, faces and texts; of lost cats, of found pictures, cut-outs, recreations; a poetic subversion in diary form, one that breaks the calendar into a novel, driving relentlessly as a journey to the end of the world.

On the death of his mother, a filmmaker makes a film to see how much her disappearance has changed his vision of the world. It is an opportunity for him to look back over his relationship with her: a relationship that made him a free individual, as a man and as a filmmaker. The second night is the final part of a trilogy that began with Letter from a filmmaker to his daughter, which was followed by Dreaming films. The making of this " Cabin Trilogy" is the fruit of fifteen years of work and reflection.

This film is a moving tribute to French filmmaker Jean Rouch. Pauwels, a former collaborator of Rouch, accompanies him on a trip to Japan. In this cinematic letter, which he himself calls “a journey into the memory”, Pauwels philosophises about the essence of cinema and, consequently, of life.

A personal travel notebook. A travel through Europe in search of thirty paintings of the iconic Christian martyr. The film is conceived as a voyage of initiation, an imaginary reportage... imaginary because without an original image of the Saint, all representations were possible.

A film on the gestures of work, those of a sculptor, a designer, a composer and dancers. A sketch of their relationship to the world subjected to the double gaze of fiction and documentary.

Motorway, roads, villages of Northern France, Flanders. A man with a Super 8 camera films his route, the villagers and himself. Portraits, self-portrait. As the images unfold a young villager, Josse, is intrigued by the camera’s presence. For the cameraman the lens is an eye with which one films reality, for the villager the camera represents CINEMA, the magic of fiction. Josse accosts the cameraman and leads him across the fields where his girlfriend joins them. The outing becomes their production, with themselves in front of the camera. Games. Gradually diverted by Josse’s enthousiasme the film slides into moments of fiction, until its inevitable breakdown.

A summer film, of complicity, a film linked to the situation of "now or never" because it is born of encounters, availability, reflections or states of being in motion as time, ultimately a "snapshot" cinematographic.

A conversation with filmmaker Eric Pauwels about his Cabin trilogy, which includes Letter from a Filmmaker to His Daughter (2000), The Dreamed Films (2010), and The Second Night (2016).