A Bright Light: Karen and the Process

What does ‘normal’ actually mean? And what is ‘crazy’? Everybody attempts to convince Léa that her mother, Suzanne, is mentally ill. Her father wants to see her returned to the psychiatric clinic, but Léa refuses to see her mother in the same light: Suzanne is happy – even if she doesn’t act like others expect her to. She appears to live a joyfully infantile existence after calmly letting go of life’s pressures. Léa captures her mother’s life on film and focuses her attention on examining the old super-8 films from the family archives. When she is left to drive her mother back to the clinic after a weekend at home, Léa grabs her opportunity: She turns the car around and whisks Suzanne off on a journey; a road trip without the judgements of others. AVANTI follows a mother-daughter relationship with an ease and depth that highlights the complexity of the emotional ties within a family.

From her grandmother’s garden to California via the Mojave Desert and the cosmos, Emmanuelle Antille takes us on a journey to out-of-the-ordinary places, as we meet the people who created, imagined or discovered them. The Wonder Way is a free and personal quest, an inner exploration and a journey in search of unusual—but very real—spaces.