Adieu la rue des Radiateurs (Nina)

Here cinema is gauged against literature as to the capacity of each to express loss and disappearance. On one hand, Mathieu Riboulet reads excerpts from his book Le regard de la source, on the disappearance of a Russian friend, Nina. On the other, Vladimir Léon uses extracts of Super 8 film to sketch out the portrait of Nina Kotchekova, Léon’s friend, filmed in Moscow and Paris in the ’90s and whose destiny is in many ways akin to Riboulet’s heroine. While Léon’s raw and faded images lend body and depth to Riboulet’s text, decanting its excessive formalism, Riboulet’s text, filmed in a bright immaculate setting, expands what is present in Léon’s images, but which is withheld, compressed and fleeting: complicity and fear, distancing and death. (Yann Lardeau)