Interview about Dies Irae

How many photo and video fragments did you use in your film?

Between 8 and 9 thousands pictures. Any video fragment!

Did you shoot it all yourself? If yes, tell us more about it. If not, tell us about the sources of your material. How do you collect it?

I picked up all the pictures on Internet with Google images. There are a lot of pictures on Internet. The problem is to find high res pictures. But researches with words like "road" or "travel" give an amazing amount of results.

What comes first - the material or the film idea?

I wanted to make a movie about war disasters, torture, death… I picked up a lot of pictures about dead peoples. But every time I watched one of them, I just couldn't imagine editing it. All of these pictures need to be seen for themselves.

I also found pictures about memorial places, pictures about emptiness, about sorrow, about memory. So I decided to make a movie travel in those memorial places. But my project changed and I made a movie about a travel that brings us to one of the most impressive memorial places in our world. For me a way to talk poetically about death and to make my own memorial for all those peoples I saw on pictures.

How do you make your films in terms of technique?

It sounds very complicated but it is very simple. It just needs a lot of patience and a lot of time. It's like in "normal" animation. I had several pictures of the same objects, like "road" or "car", and I created movements by editing the pictures in a "natural" movement. The most complicated part is to keep the flow of the movement. On the pictures I picked up, there are a lot of disturbing elements like people, cars, lines on the road, billboards, even clouds… I didn't think about that, so I had to erase all those elements, picture by picture. That took a lot of time!

Tell us about your directing experiences. Maybe there are some special things about it as compared to the traditional ways.

Perhaps the only difference is even if I had always a clear idea of what I wanted to make, the materials I find influence my projects. Like I don't draw, like I don't shoot, my liberty as a creator is the way I use these materials that have their own constraints. 

How important is the social aspect to you, especially the problems of extremism in the past and the present?

It's quite simple. I think that disasters like those of World War II can happen again. So for me it's very important to try to understand the previous disasters to understand how our present could bring us to new ones.

What is your favourite photo camera?

I haven't got a camera!

Is your film perceived differently in different countries?

I think so but I don't talk a lot about this because I can't travel so much in festivals for the screenings of my works.

What I can say is that my movies have different geographical lives. For example, one of my movies can have something like a "success" in a country, doing all festivals there, winning prizes, but another of my movies won't be screened at all. So I think that people of a specific cultural area are more touched by one of my movies specifically than by another one. But I can't explain why.

What's your favourite filmmaker/film?

Dziga Vertov. For his ideas of cinema as Technics and Politic, Technic because it is politic, and Politic because it is technic.

Your favourite writer/book?

Kafka. All his books. And particularly his Diary

Anything you would like to say.

Resist!

inshort festival
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