New World! (The World Anew)

A Feature film of

Production year2023

Runtime1 h 42 min

Synopsis

"We’re on Ushant, where Jean Epstien, in the midst of a crisis after The Fall of the House of Usher, retired to take up his film career afresh and make Finis Terrae (1928). "A century later, where do we stand?" ask Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval in this film whose tone and title are reminiscent of an invocation. From one century to the next, for the pair of filmmakers pressed by the urgency of the times who set off to Calais to film The Wild Frontier (FID 2017) or to find out more about present and future revolutions in Let’s Say Revolution (FID 2021), it’s a question of responding to today’s demands in different ways. With Epstein’s foundational position in mind, the calm landscapes of Ushant are filmed in long shots, slow, insistent travelling shots in which the economy of their filmmaking seems to be relaunched and redefined. With, as an echo, past and present unrest that runs through the film in Hannah Arendt’s pessimistic voice or René Char reminding us that "once heaven and earth hated each other but heaven and earth lived". We have to start over again from nothing, or almost nothing, from these dark times, far from this world polluted by images, colonised images that we need to get rid of so that we can inhabit it differently - like the poet we see scouring the countryside in a hostile environment. Start over? Better still, set out afresh from a material base, cleanse ourselves of all pollution (of images, of the Earth), as the final movement seems to suggest. To redraw the world, lucidly, anew."
(Nicolas Feodoroff - FIDMarseille)