jeudi 15 mai 2008
Les Films du Poisson and Pierre Grise Distribution
present
57,000 km between us
a film by Delphine Kreuter
SOMMAIRE
SYNOPSIS
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
DELPHINE KREUTER INTERVIEWED BY EMMANUEL FINKIEL
DELPHINE KREUTER
CAST RESUMES
CAST AND CREW LIST
LES FILMS DU POISSON
SYNOPSIS
“Hi, I’m Nat.
I'm 14 and I live in a movie. Yeah really.
My parents are like totally crazy. Believe me.
My stepfather can't stop filming us. We're on live, morning, noon and night.
My mother, all she can think about is "increasing the number of hits our family website gets".
And me, I don't get it. I stay in my room, riding the Net. Natsoky' my log-in.
Check out the chat-rooms, you'll find me talking dirty with some irresponsible type – of course – which is more fun, right?
OK, I'll leave it at that. Let's not get boring. But hey, I'm telling you, life on earth in 2008 is going to be just fine”.
DIRECTOR'S NOTES
Broadcast your life for anyone to see, on the Internet or on TV, for anyone to click onto, out of boredom or maybe just by accident.
This is the basic idea.
People need to show themselves, they need the means to show themselves and see themselves in the everyday privacy of their own homes… A phenomenon which has become an expression of the urge to live, a way of filling a gap, of dealing with loneliness and making oneself feel alive.
People build virtual lives, above and beyond real life, in which Eternity seems somehow within reach – long before death strikes.
In these imaginary worlds, images stand in for God.
Consciously or not, everyone does their best to make life more beautiful, and better than it is.
Everyone is either an illusion, or the object of someone else's illusion. Hoping to make life bearable.
"This sense of freedom, it's unbelievable", says one of the characters out boating on a stretch of river that slips under the highway.
No outboard motor speeding out to infinity. Happiness is there. And it isn't. We make happiness and reinvent it, as we design our lives, our belief systems and our practical arrangements, to find some kind of sense of freedom wherever we can – in the visual world nowadays.
This is my subject-matter: the life force, the very human dependence on belief – even to the extent of self-deception: the vital energy involved in pulling one's life together, in devising or undertaking whatever it takes to find enjoyment.
In parallel: the adults struggle and organize and sometimes what they do verges on the absurd, or on the insane – when it escapes them. And then: Nat. She has her own system, unconscious and abrupt, playful and sincere.
Nat runs at life, but always it seems to slip out of her grasp.
She is so young that the business of surviving, day in day out, leaves her looking wide-eyed. "Us, we'll never die," she proclaims.
Wrong. Within a couple of days and nights, her illusions are shattered. Truth and reality reassert themselves. Characters step out from ehind their screens, step out from their homes.
And as they come face to face with each other, they must face up to themselves.
So different to what they hoped for and wanted and believed, different to their childhood or adult dreams.
Painful. Yes. But throughout this story, pleasure and pain are intextricably combined, the one meaningless without the other: in the world I want to describe, pleasure and pain are colours.
It's a flawed yet colourful world, in which settings stand as characters and ideas. And then, for Nat and Adrien's outing, as she touches everything he can only see behind glass or across a screen, the vision turns sensual.
The structure is like a network, bringing the various characters and events into poetic contact with each other.
In the end, the story hones a multitude of lives into a single movement that encompasses and connects them all.
DELPHINE KREUTER INTERVIEWED BY EMMANUEL FINKIEL
Can you say something about photography and video, the two media you work in, and how you shift from one to the other?
I had my first photography show in 97 and my first video was made the same year. Photography and video are two different grammars I use. With photography, what counts is the instant when something snaps into being. With a film, you have characters and those characters possess a future, even if that future is an illusion because not even at the tenth screening does anything ever turn out different…
There was a time in my life when I used to shoot video instead of taking photographs and I would bring the present home to recapture it at my leisure, at 1/24th second. Movement is a release from the violence of fixed form – and from abstraction too. Characters develop and breathe.
Also, I like stories: I like characters who experience and say stuff… A film presents and organizes the words people use: it's like photographing their voices. Also, film is a process, stepped in stages, from writing to final screening, and each stage provides a series of shifts between reality and imagination, which end up completely interdependent.
Why did you shoot the movie yourself?
A photographer needs a camera. A photographer touches the world with his or her camera. In any case, I'm in tune with the times. "Go create", says the Sony ad. There's an "anyone can be famous" side, with reality TV, and there a "anyone can shoot a movie" side, with cameras and computers. Phones even. Cameras don't mean the same as they used to. They're not sacred anymore, which is also why the gap between mega-buck movies and the rest is widening. Classic credit categories don't really relate to the reality of a film like mine, of which there are more and more. Cinema is changing, audiences are changing, people making movies are changing, techniques are changing. So let them. Stuff changes.
I know you really struggled, you made your movie almost single-handedly. It's like a manifesto.
Let's just say, I claim the freedom to do what I want. It was really brutal hearing so many people say, "You'll never make a movie." Making this movie was a necessity. In 97, I didn't think, "I'll shoot in video because video is cool", but video became a tool for me and I like using it.
How long did it take you shoot the whole thing?
The actors were all working on other stuff, shooting or rehearsing and because I started quite suddenly, they would give me a bit of time here or there. They all signed up immediately and enthusiastically, they really believed in it, which was great.
How did you come up with all these stories?
I surfed the Net at friends' houses, I thought it was really fascinating, looking into people's lives like that, from the privacy of one's own room, and that's essentially where the initial ideas came from. I thought, "What makes them want to show themselves like that, what makes them want to look at others like that?" – a phenomenon which reality TV is expanding outrageously.
How do you explain it?
I think it reassures people to see others like themselves, doing the same stuff… there's also the notion that everyone can be a "hero", everyone can be famous… It's the notion that one exists in the eyes of many others, that one is loved and looked at. As a believer is loved and looked at by God, except God isn't enough anymore. The feedback form God is not quick enough, not direct enough. People need to support and understanding… The fantasy that "I'll never be alone again" is turning real today. Images fulfil a need for the company of others.
Unexpected and unlikely connections between people were another starting-point. The Internet is good at that and it generates poetic construction.
Except your characters, the more they connect, the lonelier they feel.
You lose any sense of responsibility when you're sitting at a screen. When the characters come face to face with each other, then a fairly safe, a fairly constructed reality abandons them and so they have to confront their loneliness, they have to confront things without a screen to protect them.
One doesn't know what is going to happen in the next second and a character does not walk through a door because he's got a story to tell but because something organic is afoot. How did you achieve that?
There's a peculiar logic to it, internal perhaps, I don't know… Maybe intuition plays a great part in my work… It's a way of breathing and everyone has their own, a way of writing, of understanding how one passes from one thing to the next. Every situation is a revelation, not a stage in narrative development, and spreads like a stain on cloth, gradually changing the colour… a network rather than a linear system. I have always constructed my shows and books as if every image was a word in a sentence, so that when you place them side-by-side, an invisble thread stretches from one to the next, stirring impressions and ideas in the viewer's mind.
There's the bit you control, that you can direct through the way you arrange the different components, and then there's all that happens in people's heads, which is immense.
Words and scenes have a function, a use, to be played with. Poetry possesses meaning.
All the characters are, in a way, opaque. Really, you are constantly pursuing the idea of what each character might be…
If things are going to deepen, then I'd rather the depth lay in the encounters between characters, in the construction. It's a way of telling a story. Characters don't do things for obvious reasons, they do things and we understand, we go along with them, because of the way they move and the situations follow on from one another… One never sees characters in a professional context, they are not defined in social terms. I don't want people to identify with characters or understand them through the use of clumsy social labels, which are never rewarding. I don't need labels. And it's the same with the plot, I think. It's not an easy story to summarize. You can't say, "This is a story about…" It isn't manageable like that. I like things that can't be pigeon-holed – and characters that can't be pigeon-holed. And the same is true in real life, with the people I meet.
Why did you make your main character a 14 year-old girl?
There's something intransigent and radical about teenagers – they make few concessions. There have a need to roll back the boundaries, to break down barriers, and to believe that doing so is possible. Teenagers aren't afraid of much. The older one is, the more one is afraid, unless one acquires a kind of wisdom. Nat is not too distorted yet, not broken. She's new, she can keep her eyes open, she can see things as they are and not let 1000 prejudices obstruct her understanding of what is new… And there's a playful side too, which is perhaps more closely connected with childhood, but is still present… A way of taking some things very seriously and others not at all. Or not using seriousness in the same way adults use it, which means they see things differently.
At first, Nat's family seems unusual, but actually it's represent normality.
As far as I'm concerned, it's an average family, with average dreams and formulas for dreams, in which everyone is nice and everyone keeps to his or her allotted position. You start with something that looks smooth and then you scratch the varnish off and see what's underneath. The characters are close to cliché or caricature. I like that, because it makes them vessels for banality. They're useful because they help renovate all the stuff we've put in little boxes and left there to rot. They're a renewal, a coming back to life. The characters are a device for describing reality, they're not meant to reflect reality as it really is.
And when Nat and Adrien meet – in the real world – nothing is ever the same for Nat again, it seems.
It's like on the Internet, nothing really matters and you can always start over (they're plugged into networks, they spend all day killing, they die and resurrect several times a day). You can use different names, click on a name, enter into a relationship, suddenly vanish or make someone else vanish at a click… Sitting at a screen, you develop new reflexes, a new way of being with other people. When someone dies in real life, it changes everything forever. There's an awareness of what death is. And what life is… There's a sense of the irreversible, which sometimes seems absent from virtual reality.
Why do you say this is not pessimistic?
All the characters are impelled by a desire to live and to live a good life. Despite everything, it's the impulse to life that remains and wins through. I like people who go through all kinds of experience and yet who stand up to the light in the end, as though they're fighting for big ideas on a wider canvas. You might also say that a shattered illusion gives birth to awareness and so to acceptance, to growth, to what one might describe as a wiser form of enjoyment.
Will you go on making films?
I have learnt a great deal with this first film. I want to take things further. I'm writing something, of course. And whether I'm dealing in photographs, in films or in books, I am building worlds, a coherent gathering governed by its own rules.
DELPHINE KREUTER
Born 1973, in Lyon. Delphine Kreuter studied Modern Literature. She is a photographer. In 1997, she showed her photographs for the first time in Berlin, and in Paris at the renowned Alain Gutharc Gallery. The same year, she won the Paris Photo Prize. She is currently showing at the "J'embrasse Pas" show at Yvon Lambert. She holds a Villa Médicis Hors Les Murs grant for 2008.
Delphine Kreuter has shown her work in many different places, both in France and abroad. She has worked closely with Christian Lacroix and published four monographs.
A mixed media artist, she also works as a draughtswoman, as an illustrator, a video artist and a film-maker. “57,000 Km between us” is her first feature.
CAST RESUMES
FLORENCE THOMASSIN (Margot)
Very famous actress, she has played in numerous films, including :
200757,000KM ENTRE NOUS by Delphine KREUTER
SOIT JE MEURS SOIT JE VAIS MIEUX by Laurence FERREIRA BARBOSA
2006LE COEUR DES HOMMES N°2 by Marc ESPOSITO
2004UN LONG DIMANCHE DE FIANCAILLES by Jean-Pierre JEUNET
2003 LE COEUR DES HOMMES by Marc ESPOSITO
PRESIDENT by Lionel DELPLANQUE
2000UNE AFFAIRE DE GOUT by Bernard RAPP
1997 DOBERMANN by Jan KOUNEN
1995 ELISA by Jean BECKER
PASCAL BONGARD (Michel)
200757000KM ENTRE NOUS by Delphine KREUTER
ACTRICES by Valeria BRUNI-TEDESCHI
2006 TOUT EST PARDONNE by Mia HANSEN-LOVE
2005 LE CONCILE DE PIERRE by Guillaume NICLOUX
L'INTOUCHABLE by Benoît JACQUOT
ANNA M by Michel SPINOSA
2003CAMPING SAUVAGE by Christophe ALI, Nicolas BONILAURI
2003LA BOITE NOIRE by Richard BERRY
IL EST PLUS FACILE POUR UN CHAMEAU by Valeria BRUNI-TEDESCHI
LA CHOSE PUBLIQUE by Mathieu AMALRIC
2001DEUX by Werner SCHROETER
CARNAGES by Delphine GLEIZE
2000LES DESTINEES SENTIMENTALES by Olivier ASSAYAS
MATHIEU AMALRIC (Simon)
Best Actor Cesar
(recent films)
2007 57.000KM ENTRE NOUS by Delphine KREUTER
ACTRICES by Valeria BRUNI-TEDESCHI
BANCS PUBLICS by Bruno PODALYDES
DE LA GUERRE by Betrand BONELLO
L'ENNEMI PUBLIC N°1 by Jean-François RICHET
UN CONTE DE NOEL by Arnaud DESPLECHIN
UN SECRET by CLAUDE MILLER
LA QUESTION HUMAINE by Nicolas KLOTZ
L'HISTOIRE DE RICHARD O by Damien ODOUL
LE SCAPHANDRE ET LE PAPILLON by Julian Schnabel
HADRIEN BOUVIER (Adrien)
(currently a student at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique de Paris)
2007 57.000KM ENTRE NOUS by Delphine KREUTER
2006 BARRAGE by Raphaël JACOULOT
STEPHANIE MICHELINI (Nicole)
2007 57.000KM ENTRE NOUS by Delphine KREUTER
2004 WILD SIDE by SEBASTIEN LIFSCHITZ (winner, Prix Michel Simon)
MOHAMED ROUABHI (Khaled)
(principally director and actor in the theatre)
2007 57.000KM ENTRE NOUS by Delphine KREUTER
2003 ADIEU by Arnaud DES PALLIERES
2001 PETITS RIENS by Xavier DURRINGER
VERA BRIOLE (Solange)
2007 57.000KM ENTRE NOUS by Delphine KREUTER
2003 LA VIE NUE by Dominique BOCCAROSSA
1999 LOUISE (TAKE 2) by SIEGFRIED
MADELEINE by Laurent BOUHNIK
1998ZONZON by Laurent BOUHNIK
1996JOIE DE VIVRE by Camille BROTTE
1995LA FILLE SEULE by Benoît JACQUOT
PIGALLE by KARIM DRIDI
CAST AND CREW LIST
Director, Screenplay, Camera
Line Producer Delphine KREUTER
Screenplay Consultant Mathieu LIS
Screenplay Consultant Emmanuel FINKIEL
Production Design, Costume Design, Consultant to Director Fabrice LORRAIN
Editor Valentine BORLANT, François GEDIGIER, Delphine KREUTER
Sound Mix Olivier DO HUU
Sound Editor Frederic ATTAL
Sound Recordist Nicolas WASHKOWSKI, Nicolas GERLIC
Executive Producers Les Films du Poisson, Laetitia Gonzalez, Yaël Fogiel
Featuring
Margot Florence THOMASSIN
Michel Pascal BONGARD
Nat Marie BURGUN
Adrien Hadrien BOUVIER
Nicole Stéphanie MICHELINI
Khaled Mohamed ROUABHI
Solange Vera BRIOLE
Simon Mathieu AMALRIC
Mamie Julie LAND
Thomas Emmanuel FINKIEL
Cleaner Eve BITOUN
Adrien's Friend Jacob LYON
Little Girl Darla DIENSTAG
Little Boy Victor FIEVE
Marion (Translucid) Gregory EPENOY
Sophie (Translucid) Martin MENAHEM
LES FILMS DU POISSON
Les Films du Poisson has produced many first features, including
"VOYAGES" by Emmanuel Finkiel (Best First Film Cesar, Best Editing Cesar, Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Film).
"SINCE OTAR LEFT" by Julie Bertuccelli (Best First Film Cesar, Critics' Week Grand Prize, Cannes)
"JELLY-FISH" by Shira Geffen and Edgar Keret (Cannes, Camera d'Or)
Les Films du Poisson are currently in production with forthcoming films by Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuel Finkiel, Julie Bertuccelli, as well as several first features.
