Édition 2021

Cultivating: bringing forth and letting grow 

If the farmer cultivates, so does the artist. And rather than opposing work on the land to intellectual and creative thought – as does a certain Western tradition –, we should view them as extensions of each other, the two ends of the same universe which some filmmakers have chosen to keep close, very close together. They thus doubtless conceive their being-in-the-world in an alternative way, cherish the connections between the forces that shape landscape and creative work. By devoting their life to both garden and cinema, they are not exercising two metiers but busying themselves with living, being alive.
It is no coincidence that, in the works of these filmmakers – Rose Lowder, Sophie Roger, Robert Huot or Hilal Baydarov – we find the same thread of interdisciplinarity that is common to working in the fields and gardening, as well as poetry, performance and repetition, which all construct another temporality for the gaze, a sensory world closely linked to the world around.
In choosing the countryside as a place of life and cinema, these filmmakers transform their everyday setting into the studio where they can practice their art, the garden of their thoughts, their preoccupations, their joy or their difficulty in living, and the wellspring of their relationship to the other and their understanding of the world. It seem that their gaze, when it tarries on trees, flowers and animals, probes the depths of their being and, in this way, they create something akin to a self-portrait. 

Catherine Bizern

Read Land Cinema, Life Certificates by Becca Voelcker

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