The Big One.
The ultimate earthquake.
A silent, endless state of emergency.
Fault lines eluding us.
They build their lives, their fictions,
their dreams and their prophecies along it.
They observe it; they fear it, and then they forget it. They fall asleep on it every night.
When will it awaken them?
Drop! Cover! Hold on! is a multi-layered story about the San Andreas Fault, a geological phenomenon very close to the Hollywood film studios. The overlapping storylines reflect the geological layers of these mythical landscapes. The film becomes a mosaic of different stories that come together to paint a broader portrait of the concept of Fault, somewhere between reality and fiction, between reality and the virtual world, and between geography and emotions. All of a sudden, the boundary between fiction and documentary splits open, unveiling invisible terrestrial phenomena and human existential rifts in anticipation of an earthquake.
Stéphanie Roland