How was this project born? What is your relation to Cuba?
The project was born from an interest for these young content creators whose digital life strongly contrasts with the very tangible limits of their daily lives. When discovering Yasse, I was struck by this incongruity: his online presence is massive, he speaks to thousands of people throughout the world, but he lives in Havana, in a context where traffic—of bodies, ideas, information—remains limited.
I have always had a fascination for Cuba as a territory both frozen in time and projected in a paradoxical future. I spent quite a lot of time there since a friend of mine was living there, and I met Yasse during one of these stays. I already had in mind the idea of a film on metamorphosis, about the influence of the digital on our identities. When I met him, I felt dizzy: a young man, ultra-online, exposed to the whole world, but who feels alone still, isolated, in some sort of constant gap between his interiority and the image he projects. His desire for escape, mirroring his relation to his followers, deeply struck me.
The image, sometimes distorted, establishes a tension between all-encompassing views and a feeling of imprisonment. How did you elaborate it? What was your technical plan?
The image and the framing were thought of through a close collaboration with Arnaud Alberola, who did a remarkable job. He figured how to create a powerful, sensitive image, hugging the story and deeply embodying Yasse’s internal states. The way he captures light, textures, slow and sudden movements, gives to the film its organic density. He managed to bring to life a camera that is almost alive, accompanying the character while keeping at a fair distance.
None of us had ever shot with a 360 camera. I had expressed my desire to make the film with this device, as I was looking for a very embodied point of view. I wanted a living camera, almost autonomous, with a complete role in the film. A camera that drifts away, takes its own path, leaving the characters to better return to them. A camera that sees and hears it all.
We had very few references to imagine how to make a film with that type of tool. We invented everything as we went, it was a true cinematographic adventure. Not resting on classic codes gave us a rare, almost magical, freedom. We therefore recorded an extended, circular, almost panoptic reality, which I then reframed to 2D during editing. This reframing was a crucial step, almost like a second shooting. We had to guide the gaze, choose where to place the point of view, compose each frame like a new set. It is a way to write after the fact, from a total space. This method allows me to displace the gaze within the image, as if space itself was looking for an out. The seeming freedom of 360° collides with a symbolic imprisonment: despite this widening of the shot, the character stays confined to his frame. It is a way to visually translate this paradox—and to a greater extent our team’s—between maximum connectivity and inner imprisonment.
In the vlogging sequences, Yasse appears as a kind of amateur archaeologist and historian of Havana, which appears in a state of decay. What were you interested in within this relation to the architecture of the city?
What moved me about Yasse, it’s his way to reactivate the memory of the city through his phone. He films ruins, building details, forgotten places, and restores them through a form of online existence. I saw a poetic and political gesture. The architecture of Havana, with its faded beauty, becomes the mirror of a utopia in ruins. Through his vlogs, Yasse becomes despite himself the witness of a rotting world, but also the carrier of a gaze still very alive.
In a tension between solitude and hyper-sociability—virtual or real—, the film progresses towards a transfiguration of the character. Could you revisit the writing of the script and the construction of the narrative?
The narrative was built in a very fragmented way. I co-wrote it with Anna Belguermi. For six months before the shoot, I had regular talks with Yasse: he would tell me about his daily life, his fears, his dreams, his desires… Together, with Anna, we wrote a story very close to his, while staging it. Even if the film leaves room for improvisation and accidents of the real—like the flooding scene of a Havana neighbourhood, imposed on us—, everything was rigorously rebuilt.
There was this desire to bring Yasse to a form of transfiguration. We had, from everything he communicated to me, to compose a narration respectful of his reality while turning it into a metaphor of his own aspirations. What I was interested in, was showing how, through speaking to himself in front of the camera, he transforms. We witness a sort of erosion of his public character, until a more dreamlike, almost mystical turning point. I wanted for the film to imperceptibly creep from documental realism to a more inner, more hallucinated form.
The loneliness of the character is also alluded to through the film’s score and the processing of multiple voices. In which direction did you work this sound composition?
The sound was conceived with Irwin Barbé, whom I have been collaborating with for a long time. The sound is thought of as a mental space. We sometimes hear several layers of voices—Yasse’s, voice messages, ambient sounds—coexisting in the same temporality, as if we had entered his mind. I wanted for the viewer to feel this sensorial and cognitive saturation point we all know: being alone in a room and still surrounded by notifications, stories, digital voices, distant sounds. The mix was designed as a sort of drifting, between ASMR, urban solitude and technological meditation.
Images of birds gradually regaining their freedom punctuate the film. What are they a symbol of? What does Farid Al-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds text, which opens the film and that we hear passages of, inspire in you?
To me, the birds are a metaphor that is both simple and powerful: one of the desire for escape, weightlessness, inner freedom. Farid Al-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds guided me all throughout the writing process. This search for absolute, carried out as a group, deeply resonated with Yasse’s journey, torn between isolation and the call of the elsewhere.
The poem gives structure to the film: it appears in different forms—at the opening, said by a character, whispered on its own, or retold by the digital voices in the voice over, like a floating litany. I wanted it to instil the story, to softly dye it, almost imperceptibly, like an underground presence.
But this motif of the bird is not just metaphorical. What I was deeply moved by, in Havana, was the very tangible relation many Cubans have with the birds. There are palomeros on almost every roof of the city: men raising carrier pigeons, calling them, watching them fly away, seeing them come back. Every bird has a name, it is loved, guided. It felt very beautiful, especially in the political context they live in. The link felt evident. This is why there is also, in the film, another more quiet, more withdrawn character. He does not escape through words or the camera, but through the way he cares for his birds. I liked the idea of the film offering two relations to the escape: one metaphorical, inner, digital; the other more tangible, carnal, interacting with the living.
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
