International Competition Award: FUCK THE POLIS by Rita Azevedo Gomes

Georges de Beauregard International Award: FRÍO METAL by Clemente Castor

Special mention of the International Competition Jury: COBRE by Nicolás Pereda

French Competition Award: BONNE JOURNÉE by Pauline Bastard

Georges de Beauregard National Award: HORS-CHAMP, LES OMBRES by Anna Dubosc, Gustavo de Mattos Jahn

Cnap (National Centre for Visual Arts) Award: DES MILLÉNAIRES D’ABSENCE by Philippe Rouy

Special mention of the Cnap (National Centre for Visual Arts) Jury: L’AMOUR SUR LE CHEMIN DES RONCETTES by Sophie Roger

First Film Award: FANTAISIE by Isabel Pagliai

Special mention of the First Film Competition Jury: LOS CRUCES by Julián Galay

Special mention of the First Film Competition Jury: SI NOUS HABITONS UN ÉCLAIR by Louise Chevillotte

Claudia Cardinale Foundation Award: FERNLICHT by Johanna Schorn Kalinsky

Cine+ Distribution support Award in partnership with GNCR: MORTE E VIDA MADALENA by Guto Parente

Flash Competition Award: گل‌های شب ِدریا by Maryam Tafakory

Special mention of the Flash Competition Jury: A PRELUDE by Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Special mention of the Flash Competition Jury: CONTROL ANATOMY by Mahmoud Alhaj

Special mention of the Flash Competition Jury: LENGUA MUERTA by José Jiménez

Alice Guy Award: ABORTION PARTY by Julia Mellen

Renaud Victor Award: BULAKNA by Leonor Noivo

Special mention of the Renaud Victor Jury: SI NOUS HABITONS UN ÉCLAIR by Louise Chevillotte

High School Award: NEXT LIFE by Tenzin Phuntsog

Special mention of the High School Jury: MIRACULOUS ACCIDENT by Assaf Gruber

The Second Chance School Award: NEXT LIFE by Tenzin Phuntsog

Special mention of the Second Chance School Jury: JACOB’S HOUSE by Lucas Kane

Audience Award: LA JUVENTUD ES UNA ISLA by Louise Ernandez

International Competition Award: FUCK THE POLIS by Rita Azevedo Gomes

Georges de Beauregard International Award: FRÍO METAL by Clemente Castor

Special mention of the International Competition Jury: COBRE by Nicolás Pereda

French Competition Award: BONNE JOURNÉE by Pauline Bastard

Georges de Beauregard National Award: HORS-CHAMP, LES OMBRES by Anna Dubosc, Gustavo de Mattos Jahn

Cnap (National Centre for Visual Arts) Award: DES MILLÉNAIRES D’ABSENCE by Philippe Rouy

Special mention of the Cnap (National Centre for Visual Arts) Jury: L’AMOUR SUR LE CHEMIN DES RONCETTES by Sophie Roger

First Film Award: FANTAISIE by Isabel Pagliai

Special mention of the First Film Competition Jury: LOS CRUCES by Julián Galay

Special mention of the First Film Competition Jury: SI NOUS HABITONS UN ÉCLAIR by Louise Chevillotte

Claudia Cardinale Foundation Award: FERNLICHT by Johanna Schorn Kalinsky

Cine+ Distribution support Award in partnership with GNCR: MORTE E VIDA MADALENA by Guto Parente

Flash Competition Award: گل‌های شب ِدریا by Maryam Tafakory

Special mention of the Flash Competition Jury: A PRELUDE by Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Special mention of the Flash Competition Jury: CONTROL ANATOMY by Mahmoud Alhaj

Special mention of the Flash Competition Jury: LENGUA MUERTA by José Jiménez

Alice Guy Award: ABORTION PARTY by Julia Mellen

Renaud Victor Award: BULAKNA by Leonor Noivo

Special mention of the Renaud Victor Jury: SI NOUS HABITONS UN ÉCLAIR by Louise Chevillotte

High School Award: NEXT LIFE by Tenzin Phuntsog

Special mention of the High School Jury: MIRACULOUS ACCIDENT by Assaf Gruber

The Second Chance School Award: NEXT LIFE by Tenzin Phuntsog

Special mention of the Second Chance School Jury: JACOB’S HOUSE by Lucas Kane

Audience Award: LA JUVENTUD ES UNA ISLA by Louise Ernandez

“After Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)”. With this terse phrase, Andrius Arutiunian unambiguously asserts the connection of his film with the classic of American structural cinema. He takes the austerity and sophistication of this radical gesture—a continuous slow zoom-in lasting almost an hour, over a crescendo of sinusoidal sound—and transposes it from inside a New York studio to outside, from human time to immemorial time. Rather than a remake, the film is the reinterpretation of a score. In slight jolts, the camera zooms in on an Armenian landscape scarred by mining and military attacks from a neighbouring country. On the soundtrack, the variations produced by the interaction of sinusoidal waves are punctuated by a slowly chanted dialogue. End Pull opens the artistic and aesthetic conversation to Armenian syncretism, bringing back to life two creatures from pre-Christian Zoroastrianism. With their sensual, slightly bored voices, as if hanging over or inside the mountains, demons Harut and Marut talk, on the verge of delirium, about bits and pieces of this world as they wake up from a long sleep. The geological and geopolitical context is hardly even mentioned is this meditation that prophesises as much as it remembers, and draws a bow at some subterranean mythologies. On a historical temporality marked by destruction and rebirth, End Pull superimposes a strictly cinematographic temporality based on the relationship between the ever-tighter focus on the valley’s rock strata and the psychoacoustic soundscape—ghost sounds produced by our brains. Originally a sound artist, Andrius Arutiunian chose cinema to explore the tension between permanence and ephemerality, abstraction and narration, and to tune these notes to a new piece in an almost hypnotic experience that celebrates beauty as much as sadness.

Louise Martin Papasian

Interview

Andrius Arutiunian

End Pull is freely inspired by Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). Could you tell us about this reference? When did it come into play in the making of the film?

Michael Snow’s way of perceiving temporality as a spatial construct has always captivated me—that on-screen seance of hypnosis. But I approached Wavelength strictly as a method, a protocol of sorts, one which End Pull departs from rather quickly. For End Pull escapes the confines of an apartment in New York and transports the viewer into the Armenian mountains, allowing the gaze to wander freely in the vast landscape. The focus here is no longer fixed to a single point in a room, but instead it plunges into an ancient riverbed through geological formations and historical distortions. It’s this deliberate act of hypnotic transition—from interior to exterior, from human time to deep time—that became the central gesture of the film.

End Pull consists of a slow, continuous zoom whose movement is only interrupted by changes in light, suggesting that the film was shot at different times of the day and over several days. What were the film’s technical constraints? How did you work with your cinematographer?

End Pull was shot from a fixed camera angle, and the main constraints included the natural elements themselves—the scorching sun, the wind which visibly trembles the camera throughout the film. We used five lenses to manually zoom into the vast terrain, shooting the film through the course of a week. Since every focus pull had to be performed manually by the cinematographer Louis Braddock Clarke, I designed a score to guide each zoom in. Standing behind the camera, I would count out a repetitive rhythm: “and… pull…” indicating the next cue. This phrase, repeated every few seconds like a little mantra, became a refrain of the shoot itself and ultimately gave the film its title.

A conversation between two characters awakening from a very long sleep is gradually integrated into the image. Who are they?

The film is syncopated with a sparse dialogue between two Armenian-Zoroastrian demons by the names of Hārut and Mārut. These ancient spirits have been historically linked to magic, perfumery, alcohol brewing, and fiction. In the film, they appear awoken from their millennial slumber, hanging upside down in a cave, disturbed by the recent artillery fire and the mine drilling. Hārut and Mārut do not seem evil but they are not empathetic either, they exist in their unrelenting boredom, in a constant desire for disappearance. Ancient demons who have lost their paradise, but are unwilling—or perhaps unable—to fully withdraw.

The text has a metaphysical and spiritual dimension, with some contemporary references. How did you elaborate it?

The text has a tense relationship to the visuals, it interferes with and amplifies the slow moving zoom into the mountains. I wanted to write it analogous to how human time feels to geological time. The script had to be like the demons themselves, contradictory and slippery, without a need for clarity or reason. Hārut and Mārut are therefore ever-present as long as the film is watched. In the end, they overpower the camera and take over its final plunge into the darkness. Ruminating in a rambling fashion and relentlessly repetitive, they seem to me like children learning to play with a toy, slightly unconvinced yet at the same time very certain of their ways…

The film uses sound to create a hypnotic atmosphere. How did you work on the soundtrack? What was your approach? And how did you work with the texture of the voices?

Borrowing from Snow, I used a sine-wave generator but multiplied it by three. The soundtrack is built from the resultant tones—a psychoacoustic phenomenon where a “ghost note” appears in our heads when two tones are combined, a note which isn’t physically present. In the film, these ghost sounds gush like a wave with varying intensities, akin to the film’s ancient riverbed that once carried an evidently huge river. I filtered and distorted the sound at points, creating small islands of respite between the sine-wave pressure. The dialogue was recorded as a counterpart to it all, deliberately fragile, sleepy, not easy to grasp. With a play-like tone, the recording was done thinking of a disturbance, a rupture within the overall film’s continuous pull.

What are these mountains? What do they mean to you? Why did you choose not to give the film its geographical and geopolitical context?

End Pull was shot from my uncle’s small garden which has been in the family for generations. There were apricot fruits growing just behind our backs while we were shooting the film, and we even witnessed a murder of a snake. This is definitely an emotionally dear space for me. At the same time, the village has been marked by recent Azerbaijani shelling and gold mining by a Russian-British conglomerate, both of which disasters have greatly disturbed the local ecosystems. These events seeped directly into the writing and how I imagined the two demon characters for the film. For me, the film maintains its rootedness in the Armenian mountain landscape, but without focusing on that exclusively. After all, demons don’t subscribe to geopolitics.

Interview by Louise Martin Papasian

Technical sheet

  • Subtitles:
    English, French
  • Script:
    Andrius Arutiunian
  • Photography:
    Louis Braddock Clarke
  • Editing:
    Louis Braddock Clarke, Bianca Oana
  • Music:
    Andrius Arutiunian
  • Sound:
    Andrius Arutiunian, Pranas Gudaitis
  • Colour grading:
    Julija Steponaitytė
  • Cast:
    Julija Steponaitytė, Andrius Arutiunian
  • Production:
    Bianca Oana (Bianca Oana)
  • Contact:
    Andrius Arutiunian