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Cinema Elvire Popesco -
Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - 20:30
Cinema Elvire Popesco -
Friday, March 30, 2018 - 18:00
Written by:
William Laboury
Cast:
Julia Artamonov, Olivier Lin, Bernard Blancan, Shanti Masud, Garance Marillier, Yamato Itakura
Cinematography:
Raphaël Vandenbussche
Editing:
William Laboury
Sound:
Maxence Dussère
Music:
Maxence Dussère
Producer:
Yannick Beauquis
Production:
La Fémis
Romanian Premiere
When you’ve seen all the sunsets of the world, all the blossoming of flowers and their autumnal decay, what does it all amount to? Splicing together YouTube videos, Google Earth captures and virtual tours, Hotaru questions the reliability of memory and humanity’s obsession over being remembered. With a mind that eternally records everything, teenage Martha is sent into space, as a message for potential extraterrestrial civilizations. Her only connection to Earth is the voice of Bernard and the memory of a late-night love. But when it appears that the boy she remembers never actually existed, reality as a whole is questioned, in a struggle to distinguish between dream and waking life, futility and meaning. (Diana Mereoiu, BIEFF 2018)
Director:
Contact:
williamlaboury[at]gmail[dot]com
Festivals, awards:
- Special Jury Award - Clermont-Ferrand Labo 2016
- IndieLisboa 2016
- Winterthur International Short Film Festival 2016
- Golden Donkey Award - Concorto Film Festival 2016
- Imagine Science Film Festival 2016
Curatorial comment:
Hotaru is a piece about the images that shape memory, about the obsession of memory and its opposite, amnesia. With the aid of CGI, the film immerses us in a mind full of recollections resembling the aesthetics of 80s video games. This virtual realm recalls Chris Marker’s CD-ROM, Immemory, through its attempt to reconstruct the flow of consciousness, to get lost in a cartography of memories where hazardous connections cannot be summed up in a simple chronological sequence. (…) Reminiscences, often arbitrary, sometimes fragmented or repetitive, are accompanied by several voice-offs that guide us between the mental world of the heroine, Martha, and that of and Bernard. These voices tell us that one day, Martha was sent into space. She is hypermnesic: she remembers everything, down to the most insignificant detail of a distant conversation (…) So uniqueness has disappeared and in a multitude of red sun-sets, one no longer believes to ever be able to marvel at something. Therefore, in order to play life again, you have to pretend to believe in it. (bullesdeculture.com)
Hotaru is a piece about the images that shape memory, about the obsession of memory and its opposite, amnesia. With the aid of CGI, the film immerses us in a mind full of recollections resembling the aesthetics of 80s video games. This virtual realm recalls Chris Marker’s CD-ROM, Immemory, through its attempt to reconstruct the flow of consciousness, to get lost in a cartography of memories where hazardous connections cannot be summed up in a simple chronological sequence. (…) Reminiscences, often arbitrary, sometimes fragmented or repetitive, are accompanied by several voice-offs that guide us between the mental world of the heroine, Martha, and that of and Bernard. These voices tell us that one day, Martha was sent into space. She is hypermnesic: she remembers everything, down to the most insignificant detail of a distant conversation (…) So uniqueness has disappeared and in a multitude of red sun-sets, one no longer believes to ever be able to marvel at something. Therefore, in order to play life again, you have to pretend to believe in it. (bullesdeculture.com)