si nous habitons un éclair, The Heart of Eternity

I had never felt the desire to direct until I lost my mother. I picked up a camera as I would have clung to a handrail, without thinking that the images I was capturing might one day become a film. Filming allowed me to inhabit a world transformed by absence. It helped me begin to move again.

As an atheist in a Western society, I was deeply shaken by the absence of ritual and the sacred. I felt the need to invent my own. Starting with the construction of a kind of pagan temple, the film itself became a space—somewhere where one could reflect on death with others. Louise Warren wrote an essay entitled The Shape and the Grief –Archives of the Lake. In it, she develops the idea that mourning demands gesture; it needs it. I also believe that something must be embodied for the sacred to take hold: it can be a physical space, but also a shared moment, a repeated movement, a poem passed between people, a secret. I wanted to welcome death into my life, to be able to live alongside it without fear—and the space of the film became a clearing for that.

It was a slow weaving between the material I was filming, the editing—where Yuna Alonzo and I worked in fragments—and a writing process carried out in parallel with Sabrina Delarue until the very end of editing. With Yuna, a filmmaker and editor whose work I greatly admire, we would discuss what was missing after editing a sequence, which threads needed to be pulled, which scenes should be re-shot. Thanks to her, I dared to do things I never thought I could—like turning the camera on my father and brother. Sabrina, on the other hand, didn’t see the footage. Our exchange was essentially dramaturgical: how to find the movement of the film. A writer and director herself, she introduced me to the art of documentary writing, making me aware of the project’s pitfalls and helping illuminate unexplored wells of meaning. This three-way process enabled a fertile dialogue between filming, editing, and writing.

The camera is an extension of my gaze, and that searching gaze is at the heart of the film. There are few spaces where metaphysical questioning can unfold—poetry is one of them. In the film, I approach poems like oracles. I love the materiality of the page, the raw power of a few words that attempt to confront the abyss. The same intuition guided me with still images. What strange presence do some images hold? What is it that persists despite the passing years? I wanted to get close to what, in these faces, defies time—the quality of a gaze, the precision of a gesture—and to dive into the mirror those images offer us. A portrait contains something of eternity. The works I chose are both mysteries and companions. I converse with them, from silence to silence.

Death imposes a heavy silence on speech. And yet, if there is one thing we all share—or will share—it is death. By turning to my loved ones, I chose to treat death as an opening, deciding it could lead us to think together, rather than retreat into silence. The intensity of our conversations approached that of poetry: the strength of our bond—someone deeply loved, shared between us—led each friend to something essential. It was an initiatory path for me: their reflections genuinely helped me to live. I’m grateful that the film bears witness to that and may offer others secrets that help them to stand upright.

In my spiritual void, in my obstinate search for transcendence, I made attempts—let’s say, strange ones—types of experiments in calling forth. But it turns out one often fails when trying to find the dead! Documenting my attempts and failures tells, in a concrete way, the wanderings of an absence one tries to inhabit. These rituals are entirely sincere, carried out like a child following every possible lead. The sequences oscillate between hope and disillusionment. Under the camera’s gaze, the setup—like a fishing net—waits for reality or the supernatural to respond. But signs never come from where we expect them.

“Our inheritance was left to us by no will,” wrote René Char. How do we survive the loss of someone we love? The film explores invisible legacy—the part of the other we carry within us. It’s a vertiginous thing to explore, but also a profound, subterranean joy, because the dialogue can continue. In the face of death, our loved ones find unexpected resources to overcome despair—resources that are treasures of wisdom, difficulty, flashes of philosophy, metaphysical insight. Death sets us to work. The film celebrates these paths of love and nothingness. There is resolutely life in death.

I shot with an old camera whose image I loved—a painterly image, with texture. I had never filmed before, so I learned by doing. I tinkered, failed, tried again. Between shoots, Yuna Alonzo pushed me to refine my framing and trust my instincts. Simon Gaillot, a filmmaker with a lynx’s eye, watched all of our work-in-progress. He and Yuna gave me precious encouragement and support. I wanted the film to feel like a poem—to embrace abstraction, juxtaposition of textures, suspension. A film as thought.
At the same time, there were things I wasn’t able to film—and I accepted that. Sometimes, filming helps you to live; sometimes, you just have to live.
Sound recording was often more delicate. The post-production work by Ange Hubert on sound editing and Romain Ozanne on mixing was meticulous, like fine craftsmanship. In terms of sound, we remained faithful to the raw quality of the rushes—with silence, emptiness, and accidents—while also opening the film to its inherent sensuality and sensory world.

I needed silence. That bareness moves me—I feel it expresses both shock and a yearning for transcendence: the world is mute, so we must make it speak. That said, I wanted the audience to leave the film gently. With musician Léonie Pernet, we spoke about a single piano piece—very simple, a kind of consolation for returning to oneself. And she composed a melody of such delicacy… grief and light.