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THE HOUSE AMONG THE TREES BY PAUL BRIHAYE

"During a walk in Normandy with a friend, I discovered an abandoned house hidden among the trees. Inside were objects, clothing, and handwritten texts that hinted at a presence which seemed to have left, without totally disappearing.

The house becomes the setting for an ongoing disappearance, where memories are run through with gaps, and imagination contaminates reality. Shot on 16mm film, the footage is treated with transformative processes: burying in soil, humidity, fermentation, lifting of emulsion. The film strip crackles and deteriorates, as if the house itself were attacking the medium entrusted with preserving it. More than simply recording the disparition, the filmed images physically bear its marks.

The House Among the Trees explores a contradiction: wishing to preserve the traces of a life all the while admitting the impossibility of saving them. How to watch something disappear without trying to retain it? Filmmaking offers a way to experience the fragility of what stays behind, learning to look differently at the remains."

Paul Brihaye is a French filmmaker whose work explores marginal territories and invisible places – sewers, former mines, prisons, abandoned houses – at the intersection of memories and imaginaries. Through documentary, fiction, and experimentation, he examines the traces left behind by beings and spaces, as well as the capacity of experimental forms to bring out silenced stories. The montage of The House Among the Trees is a collaboration with Katya Ivanova, a Russian documentary filmmaker and editor based in Paris. Her work often explores different forms of grief, whether related to death, exile, or other forms of rupture.

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