by Éric Baudelaire, France 2022, 67'
| SCREENPLAY: Éric Baudelaire, Anne-Louise Trividic | CAST: Oxmo Puccino, Dalì Benssalah |
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| PHOTOGRAPHY: Claire Mathon | PRODUCER: Éric Baudelaire (Poulet-Malassis Films), Sylvie Pialat (Les films du Worso) | |
| EDITING: Claire Atherton | LANGUAGE: French | |
| SOUND: Éric Lesachet, Philippe Welsch |
Presented at the 15th edition of Lo schermo dell'arte, 2022
Artist Éric Baudelaire's film is a cinematic diptych, a reflection on the passing of time and on how to live the days that are given to us. The first act, set in the largest flower market in the world in Aalsmeer, Holland, is shot in documentary style: the industrial handling, preparation and storage of millions of bouquets passing through large refrigerated hangars to be auctioned, fueling a globalized and environmentally problematic market. In the second act, freely inspired by the play The Man with a Flower in his Mouth, written by Luigi Pirandello in 1922, an actor plays a man suffering from an epithelioma - a mouth tumor incurable at the time of Pirandello - who approaches a traveler in a bar, at night, in a Parisian train station. Their seemingly trivial conversation becomes a metaphysical monologue when the man, who feels death approaching, clings to life by scrupulously observing the facts, as if to bridge the gap between himself and the rest of the world. The man is played by the actor Oxmo Puccino, the client by Dalì Benssalah.
Éric Baudelaire
(Salt Lake City, 1973) is a visual artist and filmmaker. He has had solo exhibitions at Spike Island, Bristol (2022); Matadero, Madrid (2020); Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie, Sète (2019); The Island Club, Limassol (2019); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017). His works have been screened in international festivals, including: Locarno Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; New York Film Festival; FID Marseille; Viennale; International Film Festival Rotterdam. He won the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2019.
Selected Filmography
2022 When There Is No More Music To Write, and other Roman Stories; 2019 Un Film Dramatique; 2017 Also Known As Jihadi; 2014 Letters to Max; 2013 The Ugly One; 2011 The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images
baudelaire.net