Director: Miléna Trivier

Palma

Jeanne take her daughter for the week-end in Majorque. While everything goes to rack and ruin, mother’s only concern is to photograph Kiki, the classroom mascot.

Algorithms of Beauty

In 1772, Englishwoman Mary Delany wrote to her niece: “I have found a new way of imitating flowers.” The imitation in question was the art form called decoupage, based on cut-outs and reshuffling of pictures. The charm and botanical precision of these works attracts attention of even today’s artists, among others by an anonymous programmer who is trying to invent a way of capturing the flowers’ vivacity in pictures. With this aim in mind, she has created an algorithm, which would combine science and beauty, similarly to Delaney’s efforts, whose illustrations it is meant to animate.

12.Août.2002

12 August 2002 is the date which was printed on every shot in this film by the memory of the camera. On that day a huge tower which disrupted the north wing of an abandoned castle was torn down, floor by floor. The film is a record of the methodical disruption of this building by inhuman and all-powerful machines. The voice-over consists of a phone call by the author John Berger (1926), who has written numerous and radical opinion pieces in favour of the people of Palestine.

Behind the Shutters

The doors of the abandoned Raverdy coffee and chicory factory remain closed, just like everything around it. The director – herself a descendant of the Raverdy family (and expecting her first child) – goes in search of the stories behind this sealed-off part of the city. She moves in with her 91-year-old grandmother, who lives over the road. Piece by piece, she is able to reconstruct events leading up to the factory’s closure, using old photos, advertising brochures, myths, language games, conversations with her grandmother and former female factory workers. These memories unfold through different storylines. The factory’s surroundings are explored through a poetic film style, and the history of the nunnery next to the factory is also revealed. This sensitive film is a reflection on the invisible and the forgotten, revolving around women and the changing body.