Synopsis
Cécile et Marie prepare to visit together the Museum du Quai Branly.
I live in Russia , in the middle of Siberia in the town of Krasnoïarsk. Seven thousand miles away from the rest of the world… I sometime have the feeling to be on a different planet. I was really glad to receive the proposition of Jean-Marie Gigon to be one the directors of the collection “La visite”. The possibility to direct a film in France was a real gift for me. My movies : Territoire de l’amour (2010) and Manuel de libération (2016) were already about people with disabilities meeting other people. I show the the life of my characters in closed psychological and neurological facilities . I captured their relationship, sometimes full of conflict, but mostly their struggle to live freely.
My spotting in February 2017 in Paris ended up with some marvelous encounters with the heads of the project, and with a place , the Museum du Quai Branly. And mostly the encounter with Cécile and Marie who accepted to be the characters in my film. Since the very start I thought of two characters. I imagined a dialogue inside this place, their exchange would invite us to think about life, culture and ourselves.
Cécile is soft, head full of dreams, audacious, she lives and work at the farm far away from Paris. She likes films , mostly documentaries and reading. She’s really passionated about animal and the prehistory, and loves video games. Marie is agile, spontaneous and talkative. She’s a sculpter and lives in Paris. She works in a workshop and participated to many exhibitions. Her main subject: “Gothic”. Besides pottery she also love acting in the theater des Toupies and she’s passionated about needling, she invents new clothes and make her own costumes.
She loves to show her univers and I personally like to think that Marie lives in her own world. It was important for me that Cecile and Marie meet each other before shooting. The movie would open on their daily routine filmed up close. We would see Cecile working in the farm and Marie would be in her workshop in Paris. Surrounded by her pottery creations. She would talk to us about her passion. Two different spaces would answer to each other. From rural idyll, we would travel to a more urbain territory, more agitated. A phone call between Cecile and Marie would bring us to a new space : The museum du Quai Branly.
We would find ourselves outside of the museum first, before going in through the South America section, with the exhibition about ritual dances and Andes. The exhibition would allow us to film a mysterious univers. The faces of the character would sometimes be answered to by the Masks in the exhibition.
The fragile and human world would be in contradiction with the scary and troubled world full of chimeras of our subconscious. Marie will become a sort of guide for Cecile in the unknown. Will my characters end this journey in one piece ? What will be the impact on their life ? I wish to make a film around the dialogue thats going to occur between my two characters.
Alexander Kuznetsov
