Adel, a desperate jobless father, gets out on the streets of Beirut hoping for change. Can you tell us more about the conditions that have led your protagonist to take action? When you are the only breadwinner in your family and you have to provide them with food and the most basic needs of life, pay the school tuition fees, the rent and the bills. Then you find yourself jobless without any income, you start feeling useless and obliged to take action. That’s the case of Adel, a 42 years (...) Continue Reading »

Ada goes swimming in the Icelandic sea and reflects on raising a child in a country that feels nothing like home. As she enters the freezing water, she relives her traumatic pregnancy. Soon her swimming eases. Facing her fears is helping her heal. Has animation always been an area of interest to you? I’ve always loved animation, as a child of course, but also as a grown up. It’s such a beautiful and fascinating process. But it hasn’t been part of my practice until On the Surface. It’s my (...) Continue Reading »

A couple rushes out of a glamorous party. On their way home, an argument leads to a brutal car accident. When George regains consciousness, Christina has disappeared. He will then experience a real descent into hell. Where did you get the idea for the couple in the film? The story in the film is based largely on my personal life. It’s coated over by the animation, the genre, the film’s atmosphere, all that… But the story is still pretty autobiographical. How would you describe your (...) Continue Reading »

Concertina is an interlocking narrative film that jumps between parallel realities as two sets of brothers discuss their dreams of one another. The film explores themes of ecology, family, and labor using magical realism as a narrative device to create dark, ethereal worlds that offer a glimpse into the power of the physical realm over our collective psyche. Why were you interested into brotherhood? Do you have further projects in mind on this theme? I was interested in brotherhood (...) Continue Reading »

In the French Jura mountains, at the end of fictitious Middle Ages, Else is an herbalist and a midwife. With Nicole, her young apprentice, they are disturbed during their daily practice: a stranger riding a horse demands to gather all the women of the village in its small church. Why did you choose to use the Middle Ages to tell this story? And why set it in the Jura mountains? The Middle Ages is a very broad historical period, and is sometimes very caricatured. In the film, I depict the (...) Continue Reading »

During the 2005 French riots, four young students from the banlieu on the outskirts of Paris hear about an old urban legend: that of Paupaul, the rapist of the woods, who would attack young people from poor neighborhoods to keep them away from rich ones. As the All Saints’ Day vacations loom, they set themselves a challenge: to go through the woods to check out the existence of the legend. Why did you choose to set the story during the 2005 riots? It wasn’t so much a choice as a desire to (...) Continue Reading »

Filmmaker Steven Fraser lives with prosopagnosia, otherwise known as ‘face blindness’, which means he can’t remember or recognize faces. In this film he uses animation to convey what this means to him. How did you get to know prosopagnosia? Several years ago, I was going through the diagnosis process for autism. At this time, I was speaking to different doctors and specialists who asked my many questions on how I interact with people. During this time, they realised it was a possibility (...) Continue Reading »

Shana is looking for a job, she needs cash to leave France and her wrong crowd. But the past she’s looking to forget is never far. Besides, does she really want to put it behind her? What gave you the urge to tell Shana’s story? Are some of the characters drawn from examples or experiences you have had in real life? I’ve wanted to tell Shana’s story since meeting the actress who plays her, Eva Huaut. I’ve known her since childhood and I’d lost touch with her for 7 years. When we met again, she (...) Continue Reading »

In Natal, on the Brazilian coast, the country is preparing to launch its first manned space rocket into space. A couple lives with children near the space center, she is a cleaner and he is a mechanic, but she dreams of other horizons. Have you ever dreamt of flying or going into space? I’ve personally never wanted to go to space. Perhaps I’m a bit curious. What attracts me to space is its immensity and infiniteness. In Sidéral, space appears as the real possibility of a spatio-temporal (...) Continue Reading »

After a bus accident in the middle of nowhere, Lupa decides to tag along with another passenger, Alban, who is determined to reach the nearest village on foot. Crossing through fields and rivers, they slowly go off-course in a strange forest. Where did you get the idea for this rather supernatural adventure? This project has been in development for a very long time. It arose from life experience and my feminist and ecological convictions. A few years ago, I found myself stuck in a train (...) Continue Reading »