Fragments of a Journey to Laos

The shadows of screams climb beyond the hills. It has happened before. But this will be the last time. The last few sense it, withdrawing deep into the forest. They cry out into the black, as the shadows pass away, into the ground.

Intimate and tactile capture of the outside world through its original material (water, earth, sky, light) in the time of a look, a presence.

Lanzarote, a volcanic island of the Canary Islands was shaped in the eighteenth century by a series of eruptions. It preserves its memory through semi-desert mineral landscapes. In 2015, I traveled this territory in search of the cataclysm. In this devastated landscape, traces of a return to life were emerging.

The tale of an encounter...

Founded in the second half of the 1990s, the experimental film association L'Etna witnessed the transition from film to digital cinema. Its premises, located in the heart of Paris, were unable to withstand gentrification.

Ghosts of matter, luminous traces, original worlds, made of internal sedimentations, surface, merge, vanish.

Each year, the Tamil community from South India and Sri Lanka met to celebrate the God Ganesh. The film is a description of gestures, dancing bodies, attendance recorded during this festival, crossing reminiscences of my stays in India.

Liquefied pictures morph into substances of airborne [volatile] lights. The eye does not have hold anymore on forms with a now unsteady outline. By successive births, these throw themselves little by little in different conditions of color until they are embodied in the completion of a picture.

'The angle of the world allows us to see the real as an outer and inner presence at the same time, an opaque otherness, yet capable of becoming an intimate space. These incommensurable lengths and distances of an interior that opens up: The mysterious movement of the clouds, the cadence of the waves against the light, or the silent slippage of a barely identifiable human silhouette, everything seems transfigured, derealized and reinvented by light in a poetic world that evokes the paintings of Turner or Friedrich, the writings of Poe or Baudelaire.’ — Violeta Salvatierra

Resulting from performance projections of films painted directly on film. The film literally confronts pure abstraction and the unrolling of the film loaded with materials.

Short film by Philippe Cote.

"At the beginning, they were those words that you wrote to me in order to generate images. I would make them from far away, alone in Seville in Andalousia. Then, after a first silent version, first editing...The film would encounter its final from as an intimate essay split between your voice and poems that you read and my images." - Philippe Cote

At the origin of these departures, is the research of lights, spaces, instants to renew my cinema, to be closer to the poetic documentary: being there and watching, recording length, not trying to force things to come...

Short film by Philippe Cote.

... I head to Thailand and then to northern Lao (Luang Prabang then hopefully further north), then certainly to Cambodia. At the source of this journey, there is a longing for a renewal of my cinema, for the search of new lights, of new areas, of new relations...

Nocturnal dreamlike wandering, filmed in several cities of Southern Europe: Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. Starting from a visual motif, the film gradually develops a more metaphorical tone. The title is a tribute to the film by Clemens Klopfenstein.