Tiens-moi
11’’, 2014 / Fiction / Format: HD
A man and a woman. They lie on a cold floor in a dark space, hard to distinguish from each other, they are close yet far away.
I think of Tiens-moi as my first film in which I was able to capture a part of reality from the actors through a slow, temporally sustained narration. By placing them in the right state of mind and giving them the room for improvisation, I was able to capture their performance in a single plan-sequence. In the editing room I formed the film between states of coming and going, action and silence. Although I do not remember the editing process in details, I believe that it was an organic process.
For me there are three ‘principles’ of editing. At first each sequence has a lifetime, that is to say, a length after which it no longer brings anything, in ideas, sensations, emotions, and so we can stop it. Second I believe that we must also trust the induced effect between two sequences, by the cut. It is not the length that matters but what happens in the duration of the sequence, then the sequence that follows. Finally, one has to follow one's intuition, to always rethink about the first impression because the spectator is always in the discovery to the present time, therefore you have to fight against habits or intellectual knowledge.
Making a film is like taking a trip into the unknown, a collaborative journey. I’m eager to further experiment with narrative techniques and to explore cinema as an original art form where there’s no real divide between true and false, dream and reality, film and filmmaking.