A Flower in the Mouth

A Flower in the Mouth

2022 · 67 min · Drama

A Flower in the Mouth is a film diptych about time running out and how to live through the days that remain. The first act, filmed as an observational documentary in the world’s largest flower market, follows millions of bouquets transiting through a cavernous refrigerated hangar to be sold at auction, an industrial process at once both beautiful and terrifying. The film transitions to fiction in a second act freely adapted from a Pirandello play. A man with a flower-shaped tumour on his lip accosts a traveller in an all-night café. Their seemingly mundane conversation becomes a metaphysical monologue as the man, feeling death approach, clings to life by scrupulously observing its activity, watching reality in every detail, as if to fill the gap between himself and the rest of the world.

Directed by Eric Baudelaire · Written by Eric Baudelaire

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Cast

Oxmo Puccino The man with a flower
Dali Benssalah The customer

Make it a double feature

3h 1m together

A Flower in the Mouth

A Dramatic Film

Both from Eric Baudelaire.

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Artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire spent four years interacting with the pupils of a film class, at a secondary school in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. Keeping himself on the sidelines, he gives way to the children to express their thoughts and dreams. Their remarks are intuitive, inquisitive, yet passionate and surprisingly mature, concerning rocky and complicated issues, ranging from racism, immigration, and identity, all the way to the possibilities of film as a medium. As time flows almost unnoticed, it is evident that these children have not only become the co-directors of this film but also the heroes of their own lives.

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images · 2011

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images

MovieDocumentary

A film on exile, revolution, landscapes and memory, Anabasis brings forth the remarkable parallel stories of Adachi and May, one a filmmaker who gave up images, the other a young woman whose identity-less existence forbade keeping images of her own life. Fittingly returning the image to their lives, director Eric Baudelaire places Adachi and May’s revelatory voiceover reminiscences against warm, fragile Super-8mm footage of their split milieus, Tokyo and Beirut. Grounding their wide-ranging reflections in a solid yet complex reality, Anabasis provides a richly rewarding look at a fascinating, now nearly forgotten era (in politics and cinema), reminding us of film’s own ability to portray—and influence—its landscape.

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Letters to Max · 2014

MovieDocumentary

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[sic]

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The Ugly One · 2013

MovieDramaDocumentary

Adashi, ex-member of the Japanese Red Army, narrates a story taking place in Beirut. The melancholy of war, the pain of disillusionment. A story being written and rewritten, open to interpretation. When the time comes, return to reality can only be cruel.

The Makes

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Also Known as Jihadi follows the progress of a young man's journey from France to Syria, and back to France, where he is incarcerated for allegedly joining Daesh. Based on real events, and drawn from thousands of pages of judicial documents, the work employs the so-called landscape theory (fukeiron in Japanese). The character's paths to radicalism are rendered purely through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations traversed by the subject: a biography determined not by what the subject did, but by what the subject saw, and one that questions how these landscapes reflect the social and political structures that are the backdrop for a journey of alienation and return.

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