Directed by Charlotte Clermont

Logline: It examines the temporalities through which the body forms what we translate as the real.

Synopsis: du soleil, que ça existe examines the temporalities through which the body forms, stores, and creates what we translate as the real. Focusing on longing, distance, and language, this text-based project explores the expansiveness of both language and landscape, by installing spaciousness in the dialogue and by considering landscapes as bodies.

Distribution Contact: WFG

More Details

RUNTIME: 9 Minutes
GENRE: Experimental
PRODUCTION FORMAT: 16mm
LANGUAGE: Finnish, English
LOCATION: Ontario, Finland
KEYWORDS: Distance, Longing, Desire, Body, Language, Materiality, Hand Processing, Film, 16mm, Sea, Landscape

Director's Statement: Because of veils that obscure or illuminate the images, the inability to perceive is experienced at times in almost-erased spaces, at others in velvety dark spaces, where only details are revealed through the flickering of the film’s solarization. The rhythm between light and darkness echoes the movements of the sea, adding aqueous and sensuous layers to the film, where images seem to exist outside of the often narrative space of cinema, becoming instead paintings or photographs in motion.

The dialogues are in Finnish and in French, sharing an identical water soundtrack for insinuating the two people are staring at the same landscape. Somehow, the slightly clipped ways of speaking to each other – that the dialogue is at once a dialogue between two, and a dialogue where two people are talking to themselves at each other – gives way to the slow time that has a width to it. The text is part of the work as a voiceover, recorded by Essi Pellikka, who plays the two roles.

The overall feeling of this short film is inspired by Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death (trans. 1986) in which she describes, at the end of the book, how a window overlooking a dark sea at night becomes an element central to her work.