L Arrière Pays

This short piece is an autobiographical fable at the cross-section between SCI-FI and memory film. It explores the journey of two dreamers trapped between past and present, between dream and reality. It combines excerpts from an immigration journal, found text and images suspended in a dystopian dark space.

Two brothers: one of them has become an actor and lives in Paris; he goes back home and meets his sibling who has stayed in the village where he married "la Matiouette", a local girl. The reunion is warm, but they soon discover that now they are worlds apart.little by little, the conversation becomes less friendly, less kind, and regrets, resentment resurface. Their reunion will leave them two broken men.

After ten years away, Jacques Pruez, an unmarried, 50-year-old, modestly successful actor, returns to his home village to comfort his dying mother. His father Yvan, a family barber who's counting on his "successful" son to support him in his old age, refuses to believe that his wife is sick and insists that her doctors are killing her. She dies, and Jacques finds out that Yvan is not his real father. Besieged by memories of his childhood, the village and the past, Jacques wanders the streets at night, reliving the moments that set him apart from the rest.

Nugzari has settled down with his family in the ruins of Mutso, his childhood village in the deserted mountains of the Caucasus. Nourished by the epic legends created around this territory, Nugzari tries to pass on to his son his intimate relation to the stones and the past of this sacred hinterland of Georgia.