Director

 

I wrote and directed the short fiction film Lovers are Strangers as my Master's degree graduation project.

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Mariette and Andréas, a couple in their mid-twenties, meet Marianne at a turning point in her life: she is getting a divorce after 20 years of marriage. While Andréas and Mariette try their best to be supportive to Marianne, they question their own relationship.

 

I had a specific idea of what I wanted for the visual look of the film but had to do a lot of research and tests to achieve it. I loved the textured aspect of the miniDV camera but wanted to give it a cinematic look. Which was made possible by mounting a Letus Extreme adaptor on the camera, allowing us to combine the singular aspect of the MiniDV with the benefits of wide aperture analog camera lenses. I first built a very rustic adaptor myself to make sure it matched what I had in mind before I invested in this unusual professional adaptor.

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I also had a precise idea of what the lighting would be like: absolutely no added lights, only natural lighting or lights that were already on location. Which involved making decisions for the actors and camera placements based on the light instead of the opposite. By doing that I was trying to push the fiction closer to documentary. This was part of a reflection about the limits of fiction that started from the script itself: there is a documentary scene right in the middle of the story. In the movie this scene is partly staged, blurring the limits between documentary and fiction. I wrote the dialogues of that scene based on a psychology conference that I intended to, and later on offered the speakers to be part of the film and play their own role.

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Fiction, 2019 (France)  -  25 min

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