L'internationale des fonctionnaires

A secret figure in French underground cinema, Maria Koleva has filmed all over Paris, written about Marx and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Serge Daney. This documentary is a portrait of a histrionic Koleva, trying to reveal her militant, poetic and cinematographic universe, located in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

This two-part film revolves around the correspondence between Antoine Vitez and the filmmaker

"The State of happiness... permanent" presents itself as an extremely composed cine-photo-novel, based on the life of the filmmaker. It is, very exactly, images and sounds extracted from his personal story (curiously mixed with History itself). Not a plan that is not a piece of flesh, a piece of memory, a piece of life. Not a plan that does not fit into the raw experience of Maria Koleva. From this film, I want to highlight two very beautiful sequences: the one where she writes an essay with her cameraman on the back of a man sleeping in his bed, the one where she wonders, based on a photo where we see her as a little girl with her family during some party (in which his father seems to have played an important role), on the hat worn that day by his mother.

In his bed, John thinks he’s in New York in 2024. He’s a big funny liar. While he is making weapons for nothing, the others have taken their future into their own hands: they have succeeded in concentrating so much, in acquiring the gift of leaving the earth through a mental ray. Free... some are free. No one has ever been able to dominate thought, they invented the leaving, the great journey... seeking freedom" (excerpt from the film). But John, alias Patrick, never wanted to think alone. The spectator accompanies him in his comic justifications. A sexual nurse and an Irish killer who came to execute him for serious misconduct visit him. He gets attached to the killer. In an incredible violence is born a rare thing, friendship... John is immersed in music from the Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices. Patrick-John, the music, the beautiful heaps and the cathedral factories of the North collide in an invigorating self-laughter and a liberation of speech.