Eric Baudelaire

Over four years, Baudelaire worked with 20 middle school students in Saint-Denis, long enough to find the form of a film of which they would truly be the subjects: its characters, its authors and its promise.Read More »

The path to radicalism of a young man from France to Syria, and back to France, where he is incarcerated for allegedly joining Daesh, is rendered purely through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations traversed by the subject.Read More »

“Abkhazia is a paradox: it’s a country in the physical sense of the term, with borders, a government, a flag and a language, but it’s a state that doesn’t legally exist as, for almost twenty years, no other nation has recognized it. So Abkhazia exists without existing, in a liminal void, a limited space between realities. As such, my letter to Max was a bit like a bottle in the sea, a nod to Alfred Jarry and the world of Ubu Roi which Maxim seems to inhabit. Then fiction overtook reality.” Thus Eric Baudelaire launched a letter writing campaign, sending 74 letters in 74 days: a script for the voice- over of a film in which Max is the narrator. This exchange was to become the structure of the film: letters that should not have been received by Max, the recording of his replies, and footage of Abkhazia shot by Eric Baudelaire when the correspondence ceased.Read More »

Winter, Beirut. On a beach littered with cans washed up from the sea, Lili and Michel meet. Perhaps they know each other from before. As they struggle to piece together the fragments of an uncertain past, memories emerge: an act of terrorism, an explosion and the disappearance of a child, Elena.

Woven throughout these fragments is the deep voice of a Japanese narrator who recounts his own experience of a weeping Beirut, and his 27 clandestine years fighting alongside the Palestinians as a member of the Japanese Red Army. His voiceover shapes Michel and Lili’s story, their fate dictated by the enigma created for them by this narrator who turns out to be legendary Japanese New Wave filmmaker Masao Adachi.Read More »