Un éléphant me regarde

Henry, an American folk singer of around thirty, lands in a small isolated village. He gets acquainted with Cécile, a young amateur singer.

The story of a family and a love affair told through the journey of a young woman called Suzanne.

January 2016. The love story that brought me to this village in Alsace where I live ended six months ago. At 45, I am now alone, without a car, a job or any real prospects, surrounded by luxuriant nature, the proximity of which is not enough to calm the deep distress into which I am plunged. I am lost and I watch four to five films a day. I decide to record this stagnation, not by picking up a camera but by editing shots from the stream of films I watch.

A child waits in silence in the quiet of his home garden, in the deep countryside, alongside with his German Shepherd. He looks for his mother, looks around, checks in a shed, until he sees her leaving the house. But it’s as if she doesn’t see him. Something soon brings her back into the house, and the child is left alone with his nightmares.

After breaking up with her boyfriend, a woman named Odete descends into madness and claims to be pregnant with the child of her neighbour Pedro, who died in a car crash and is mourned by his boyfriend Rui.

Interviews with a procurer and with nineteen boys and young men who are prostitutes in Prague. The youths range in age from 14 to 19. They hustle at the central train station and at clubs. Most of their clients are foreign tourists, many are German. The youths talk about why they hustle, their first trick, prices, dangers, what they know about AIDS, their fears (disease and loneliness), and how they imagine their futures. The film's title, its liturgical score, much of it elegiac, and shots of the city's statues of angels underline the vulnerability and callow lack of sophistication of the young men.

Last June, I encountered Arno, a twenty-year-old man, with whom I immediately fell in love. To be sure that I’d see him, although he didn’t share my feelings, I proposed that we work together on a project that became "Compilation, 12 instants d’amour non partagé". Through summer, from June 21 to September 21, I asked him to come to my house daily to listen to music. This music would become the only dialog between us. It would be the commentary of the evolution of my feelings for him, would drive him into a corner, caress and take him by surprise.

High up in a valley in the Vosges, Lucien seeks peace in utter solitude. Aline, tracking a wolf, confronts her deepest fears. And young Jade grapples with her true nature.

Lucien, in his forties, decides to leave everything behind so as to go and live in the woods. Deep in the heart of a vast mountain forest, solitude slowly reconciles with life and reinforces him. One day Laura, a friend, turns up on his doorstep and attempts to make him return to his former life.

"Je flotterai sans envie" (I'll Be Floating Without Any Desire) is the third in a series of works about Arno, a twenty-year-old who I met in June 2006 and with whom I fell in love. My feelings not being reciprocated, I suggested that he participate in a project that would allow me to see him on a daily basis. "Vosges", a five-minute short film, focused, in a one-scene shot of a young man walking with his back to us through a forest, on the notion of desire and how to capture it. "Compilation, 12 instants d'amour non partagé" (Compilation, 12 Moments of Unshared Love) is like an attempt at communication and seduction through listening to songs, and questions the amorous gesture and its impact. In the third part, I wish to confront the crystallization with which I've experimented, its effect on my gaze, during Arno's many absences, to confront his words, sense his perception of an entire summer spent being in the shoes of someone who refuses the love of another.

I met Antoine June 8, 2006 in Paris. Two months later, we walked in the Eschbourg forest in Alsace Bossue.