Country: France
Year: 2006
Duration: 33'
A woman, who is still young, lives with her two sons, Samuel and Daniel, in a small fishing village. It has been ten years since she last saw her husband, who left one morning at dawn on a fishing boat that was lost at sea. Since neither the remains of the boat nor of the fishermen were ever found, every evening the woman lights a candle in the window, a propitiatory sign. “We live in a culture that expects to explain everything, to then repeat it – but instead it ends up not possessing anything of the world. It is this triumphant rationalism which has led to all the horrors of the 20th century. On the contrary, my films and my writings all express the idea that the world has a meaning but that its mystery will always remain incomprehensible. From this point of view, man’s task is to discern traces of light in the darkness, until he achieves the epiphany of a true awareness of the eternal present. It is through this notion of “signs” that appear in the perceivable world that the film’s action rejoins the expression of Maitetxu Etcheverria’s photographic triptych which inspired me.”
Biography
film director
Eugène Green
(New York, USA, 1947) moved to Paris in 1969, where in 1977 he founded the Théâtre de la Sapience, with which he staged various Baroque and modern plays. He made his directorial debut with Toutes les nuits, Prix Delluc for best debut film in 2001. He then directed Le nom du feu, presented in Locarno in 2002 and distributed together with Le monde vivant, which took part in the Directors' Fortinight. With Correspondances he was awarded in 2007, together with Harun Farocki and Pedro Costa, the special jury prize in Locarno, where he returned to competition in 2009 with A Religiosa Portuguesa and in 2014 with La Sapienza, shot between Switzerland and Italy. In 2011 TFF dedicated a retrospective to him and then went on to program several of his films, such as the documentary filmed in the Basque Country Faire la parole (2015), Le fils de Joseph (2016), which premiered at the Berlinale, and the workshop film En attendant les Barbares (2017). In 2020 he returned to the Basque Country to shoot Atarrabi et Mikelats, which was presented in San Sebastian. In addition to his activity as a director, he also works as a writer and poet.
FILMOGRAFIA
Toutes les nuits (2001), Le nom du feu (cm, 2002), Le monde vivant (2003), Le pont des arts (2004), Les signes (mm, 2006), Digital Sam in Sam Saek 2007: Memories (ep. Corrispondences, mm, 2007), A Religiosa Portuguesa (2009), La sapienza (2014), Faire la parole (doc., 2015), Le fils de Joseph (2016), En attendant les Barbares (2017), Como Fernando Pessoa salvou Portugal (cm, 2017), Lisboa revisitada (cm, 2019). Atarrabi et Mikelats (2020), Le mur des morts (2022).
Cast
& Credits
regia, sceneggiatura/director, screenplay
Eugène Green
fotografia/cinematography
Raphaël O’Byrne
montaggio/film editing
Jean François Elie
suono/sound
Frédéric de Ravignan, Olivier Laurent, Stéphane Thiébaut
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Christelle Prot (la madre/Mother), Marin Charvet (Samuel), Achille Trocellier (Daniel), Mathieu Amalric (l’uomo/Man), Maitetxu Etcheverria, Eugène Green (i lettori/Readers)
produttori/producers
Olivier Broche, François Magal
produzione, vendita all’estero/production, world sales
No Film, Le Frac Collection Aquitaine
TFF
prizes
