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A filmmaker and his crew try to enter the passionate world of Port-Royal and of Jansenism. Another Age of Louis XIV comes to life, the age of Pascal, Racine and of the “Friends of Truth”. The film itself comes up against the unanswerable question of grace.
One is confined to Paris, the other to the countryside. One is a writer, the other a director. In the spring of 2020, both correspond with their phones. They film the real and film themselves in the test, during the epidemic. This crossing of time is a historical document, intimate and collective, funny and profound, shot in the urgency of the event. What to do with this “dead time”, this regained time?
Its light, its smoky bars, its vacant land: the characters that we meet here treasure different aspects of Berlin. Vincent Dieutre puts faces and voices on some of the many artists who have settled there since the collapse of the Wall. Questioning each one about their arrival and possible departure, he depicts how Berlin has become part of the personal stories that have, in turn, been infused with a city’s history. What each artist recounts with their own words and sensitivity is also what the city has taught them – the vocabulary of the sentiments in German, the strength to live in the cold or in precarious conditions. Like a playful wink to the tourist guide format, the filmmaker travels from district to district.
Our feelings, our choices, even our death wander on the web like options, like ghosts. For the time of a last train journey, for the time of a love chat, a deadly chat, or an unlikely casting, three generations will try to definitively wrest from virtual nomadism, to put an end to self-exile that undo our lives... Between Rotterdam and Tourcoing, diving in the Flatlands, tenuous and fragile...
A studio. A man and a woman. Moving images on the screen, which he comments on, spurred on by her questions. All the footage was shot from the window of a flat: views of the street, the metro line running above it, the canal, into the windows of the buildings opposite. The flat belongs to the man’s lover, the man is a guest, spending his nights there but never his days. By the canal, young men from Afghanistan set up makeshift shelters as the man looks on, developing increasing sympathy for them. The seasons change, winter, spring, summer.
The third, Sicilian, part of the “films of Europe” cycle, Orlando ferito Roland blessé is a multifaceted ‘chanson de geste’, marked by anxiety and irrigated by hope. Or two viatica: the testamentary document written by Pasolini not long before his death (Le vide du pouvoir en Italie), which metaphorically communicated his political despair about the “disappearance of the fireflies”, and that of Georges Didi-Huberman (2009), which, on the contrary, refers to their “survival”. Vincent Dieutre travels across the far south of Europe in search of today’s “fireflies” who invent a political life on a daily basis.
Vincent Dieutre explores his neighborhood of the Xth arrondissement and sprinkles his ride micro-stories of dredge and drugs.
“My best friend, Anna, asked me if I would mind taking her fifteen-year-old son Itvan to Berlin with me. I accepted immediately.” An elegant, refined man in his forties sets off with Itvan on a long, enjoyable journey, his Winter Journey. They cross snowbound Germany by car. As the man drives the boy through cities and countryside, Itvan discovers the past and the vast job of reunification now underway. Poetry and culture are also part of the journey, which is accompanied by classical German music. When their paths cross with the man's former lovers or the journey provides unexpected encounters, Itvan also gets to know more about the man's own life. When they finally arrive in Berlin, their ways must part. Itvan watches the man leave, taking the melancholy of his existence with him. However their journey together has created an unbreakable tie between the two men. Itvan will never be the same again.