Nos Cabanes

year : 2023
technique : digital and film photography

As part of my dissertation project, I chose to create the visual graphics for a short film, Les Cabanes by Armand FOËX and Clément DEVILLIERS. For this project, I was also able to be the set photographer. 

This dramatic comedy plunges us into the lives of a group of inseparable friends, Chiara, Louis and Rose, who meet up in Reda's studio to relive past moments through the images he captured three years ago. On the screen, the old balances resurface and the gang have forgotten nothing: the start of their studies, the season of their first fights and their first loves. But above all, these memories bring back the precious presence of Anatole, who still resonates deeply in their lives. It's a story of unfailing friendship, woven of laughter, emotion and nostalgia.

To tell this story is first and foremost to evoke the period of life we know best: our twenties. It's not always easy, stuck in that narrow space between adult and teenage life. It's a time of jerky doubts, heartbreak, sometimes tears, questions full of fear, but it's also a time of laughter in the whistling underground, of parties, of missed dates, of travel, of independence not quite achieved, of first times, of discoveries, of friendships. We want to believe furiously in the world, and when we waste our time, it's always to find it again later. It's also a reminder that, all too often, we make the mistake of recognising happiness by the noise it makes when it's gone. Rather than talking about mourning, the project stems above all from our desire to appropriate the concept of the "hut" developed by the philosopher Marielle Macé. Throughout their lives, human beings construct themselves in the presence of moments, ideas, memories and worlds that are directly accessible to them and in which they can take refuge. These counter-spaces, or, in Foucault's terms, heterotropies (literally localised utopias, for example the Indian tent in the middle of the attic or the parents' double bed), are therefore both fictitious and directly rooted in reality. The question then arises as to what happens to these cabins when their material support disappears. Can our huts be destroyed, or are they simply forgotten? Isn't life a graveyard of shacks? Especially as it seems that there are not just the living on one side and the dead on the other. On the one hand, as Foucault, Fanon and Bulter have studied, certain ways of being in the world or lifestyles are not fully recognised as existences; on the other hand, certain bodies that have disappeared continue to structure the daily lives of the living.