Le Voyage D

A man goes on holiday with his wife and daughter to celebrate his retirement.

A small child, fascinated by a lighter-than-air balloon, clambers aboard. The balloon takes flight, lifting the child upward to an amazing adventure. The land-bound adults have conniptions as the balloon wafts by; the child has nothing more than a great time.

An indebted French family flees its creditors in this comic picaresque, one of pioneering French director George Méliès last films.

Shy and still living with his mother, a highway cashier one day decides to finally live his craziest dream: to visit Paris.

Vendebout (a play on “vent debout,” or headwind) and his friend Courandair (“courant d’air,” or draft) invent a flying house that transports them to a desert in less time than it would take to read about it in a book of travels.

After a year of traveling around the world the Beaudry family returns to Montreal. Shortly after husband Samuel commits suicide. Wife Maryse and their three children remains and try to understand what happened and go on with their life.

Identifying himself intimately with serial killer John Wayne Gacy, the director uses the camera to take hold of the actors, constructing fantasies that lead them to believe they are the victims in a film yet to be made. The young men, aged 19 to 26, speak from the heart about love and prostitution. Their search leads us into another world. Is this the world of John Wayne Gacy?

This documentary tells the tragic saga of 267 Congolese brought to the 1897 World's Fair in Belgium and put on display. Includes a visit to the exhibit site by Congolese of today to conduct a ritual ceremony of reburial for those who died there.

From the front room of his apartment a young boy is taken on an extraordinary journey by a big-hearted bird.

11th century. Descended from the aristocracy, Alexis flees a world dominated by money and strength. The young man, in love with justice and freedom, sets off on the roads to discover the world, abandoning his wife and family.

A husband orders his wife to recover a lost slipper. The wife enlists the aid of her friend, Beatrice (Betty Stockfield) to bring the slipper to her in Switzerland, and Georges (Roger Treville) follows Betty.

Marc, owner of a pretty mansion in Normandy, suffers from a form of dementia: he loses the meaning of words and he travels in his imagination to Asia where he had his professional life. His wife entrusts him for a while to a neighbor who tries to unravel the mysteries of his past.

A yearning in an unsettled space that, once, was shared and breathed by two cineastes, living in two different cities, trying to sustain their longing through each other’s scattered images, sounds, and monologues, pieced together in one film, one dialogue, one soul flown away by loneliness and fallen apart like a forsaken angel. Aala kad al shawk - Le Voyage immobile (or As Far as Yearning) is that dialogue-in-progress taking the shape of a film composed by sound, performed by words, perforated by images still in motion. Ghassan Salhab and Mohamed Soueid are embracing a sense of survival. This film is a sixth sense they nurtured in a world that has become faceless. Their film essay is a personal attempt to be two in one. Disguised as men, they walk among men who left behind their shadows.

In this film, shots from two voyages unfold in parallel. First, 8mm images made at the beginning of the seventies by an unknown traveler: this 20-minute film was found at a flea market. A handwritten text described an itinerary, while the boxes indicated the years 1973 and 1975. These shots, left as they are, punctuate super8 images filmed by me during two recent trips, in 2008 and 2010, organized in the sequence with respect to the itinerary that I had followed. The soundtrack for my images comes from the ambient sounds recorded on location as well as from online sharing sites, while the older images have been left silent. It is a film of snapshots revealed and developed by a gaze, taken in a geography dreamed up by the author: not a travel journal but a travel film: a voyage to the interior of a signifier, a desire of a poetics of image and sound.

2013 documentary