Finis Terrae

Four days of joy and friendship in a village in the Pyrenees. The festivities intensify life together, and cinema glorifies it.

Like a modern-day hermit, a man has settled on the traffic circle of a commercial zone, "where there are the most humans and the least humanity". Like Don Quixote, he fights against windmills, and like Saint Anthony, he is sometimes overcome by doubt. A mystical epic in the world of Speedy and Leclerc.

In the North Finistère, in Brittany, it’s late October, the low season. It’s Célèste’s last day of work as a caretaker at a seaside camping ground. Just as she’s getting ready to leave, a child disappears…

Raulhac, Cantal, France, September 1, 1905. In the forest surrounding his hometown, the young seminarian Bruno Reidal murders a child and then surrenders himself to the authorities.

Camargue, France - Nejma trains hard to win the local bullfighting competition. When she is mauled after a celebration, she starts to notice disturbing changes. News of a rogue bull on the loose terrifies the community, killing young men.

Franck is an astrophysicist. His job is to perform laser drillings with the Lynx, an exploration rover on Mars. Assisted by his collegues, he spends the night looking for traces of organic life by examining rocks. In the morning, he will meet with his son who has been traveling around the world after staying with his mother.

Titou will soon be forty. He lives high up in a sheep shed in the Corbières mountains. With Soledad, who lives in a nearby caravan, they make their own wine, compose their music, live their love in step with the seasons – much as you might cultivate resistance.

In their secluded bourgeois mansion surrounded by nature, Athmane and Patricia have decided to wean their eldest son, Idir, off heroine. Sabri, his little brother, roams about aimlessly, waiting for a sense of liberation. He is the one who will take charge of the situation.

Somewhere in Brittany, on a hill men and women have taken to sculpting the effigies of saints in blocks of granite three to five meters high. In the end, a thousand statues are supposed to reign over this site for eternity. The film sketches the portrait of this strange stone population and of this crazy project.

All rivers flow to the sea. And the sea is never full.

In 1927, filmmaker Oskar Fischinger traveled for three weeks along the side roads between Munich and Berlin, filming frame by frame the people he met along the way and the places he passed through. In 2020, the director did a remake of this film during a month-long walk between Paris and Brest.

“In Sofia, the residents of a mythical building had been evicted. I had come to hunt for film locations.” After this brief introductory title card, we discover what makes this Bulgarian building mythical, why its residents were evicted and how location-hun­ting turned into a film.

"You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? You want to change the world? Show it." John the Baptist, Gospel of Matthew.