"I'm watching a film by Mahine and Fouchard. Magnificent! Archaic, mystical, essential. To be
programmed some day with Pier Paolo Pasolini's UCCELLACI UCCELLINI.
The pace of the film, step by step, sometimes blind, sometimes radiant, a one-way ticket,
long before or after the story itself, brings the image to fruition.
Like a mineral, enigmatic, a fragment of an ancient language. It's really very very good."
– Martine Rousset (22 January 2005)
A few years ago, Mahine Rouhi, still in mourning for a family tragedy, a lost sister, and I asked ourselves the question of art and the sacred and we immersed ourselves in formal and syncretic mysticism mixing religious art with our respective origins, our beliefs and those of our ancestors and ancestors: Zoroastrian, Muslim and Marxist, even atheist (Mahine) and Christian, agnostic and animist on the edge of atheism and mysticism (Olivier)... And we made a sort of mourning film for Mahine as a call in thoughts to the departed beings. It so happens that I myself having also lost a loved one during my adolescence but my mourning being over, I was able to concentrate on the technical and aesthetic aspects while listening to Mahine who indicated and sometimes dictated the editing choices and the sorting of the images... The sum of our individualities linked in a kind of mystical and aesthetic ecstasy led us to create this difficult and demanding film to the point that at the end of the film there is a long silence with a black screen... So much so that one could miss the last shots of the film and miss the key that closes it...
This film contains a painful secret that is difficult for the viewer to guess.
The key that opens the film is a "Saint Bernadette" (Mahine) who prays before "Virgin Mary" (her lost sister, who committed suicide by immolation following a dark family story around a doubt about her virginity...). This film does indeed contain this secret that could pass for blasphemy in the eyes of a Christian but which is not the case, it is just a poem and a meditation on the use that we make of images and the interpretation that we want to make of them to express the unspeakable pain. There is no revenge here on the religious fact and the dramas that men sometimes make of it... But rather here a reuse of religious imagery to a secret personal mystical ecstasy of Mahine that here I reveal as one reveals a woman flouted by theocratic popular vindictiveness. The lost sister has not dishonored anyone and her suicide is like a final cry of revolt and this film is like the cry of pain of Mahine who lost her sister. This film is a trace of this mourning and that is all its beauty. Mystical ecstasy is not that dictated by religions but only what we make of it, what story of our own we want to stick on what is common. The common is the appropriation for oneself and which belongs to all.
1 PRINT IN DISTRIBUTION
|
distribution format |
Digital file on server (PAL) |
|
screen |
4/3 (single screen) |
|
speed |
25 fps |
|
sound |
sound |
|
rental fee |
111,00 € |
