Playing Hell

Adèle Beaulieu – Playing Hell

22 year old Ava, goes to stay with her grandfather who lives in the Franches-Montagnes. They walk through forests together looking for Antoine who had disappeared that morning.

Diploma project (2019) by Adèle Beaulieu

Know-how
Fiction

Fiction / 14 min

Synopsis

22 year old Ava, goes to stay with her grandfather who lives in the Franches-Montagnes. They walk through forests together looking for Antoine who had disappeared that morning.

Comment

Ava goes to stay with her grand father, François, a whimsical character reclused on the edge of the moutains, in the small village Les Enfers. Like a road movie, the landscapes pass by, François confides to Ava that he has lost Antoine, his dog. Granddaughter and grandfather go in search of him. They make it their quest. Like a pretext for their meeting.

Snow and fog envelop them. The space closes in on them. In the absence of a trajectory where it can unfold, time becomes an instant. It is lived on the surface of the image, on the surface of the faces. The quest for the dog becomes the quest for the other, which we scrutinize to guess its relief, to detect its informal history. Ava and François go deeper into the forest. In the snow, the mark of their passage, of their mysterious presence to each other. Their paths diverge and then meet again. A relationship takes shape, a link is created.  Adèle prints it, the nostalgic black and white of the film reveals it.

Suspended, impressionistic, delicate staging. The trace of its two characters - endearing and disconcerting - crosses us. A tasty impression of an encounter, of a fleeting and deep embrace in Les Enfers. A successful bet.

Sophie Audier, script supervisor and head of the Script Supervisor departement at La Fémis, Paris

 

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