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

On September 4, 2021, Louise Chevillotte’s mother died. She was an actress, and a “lover of poets,” according to the inscription on her tombstone. While searching for her mother’s last diary in a trunk, Louise discovers a sentence by René Char that she wrote down a few days before her death: “If we inhabit a flash of lightning, it is the heart of the eternal.” The sentence is repeated, questions marks turn it into an enigma. Did she mean to bequeath it to her daughter? The story unfolds as Louise conducts a double investigation. The first one, a poetic search, aims at understanding and shedding light on René Char’s phrase. The filmmaker turned high-school student again uses a pencil to take notes and circle words, while a friend of her mother’s improvises a brilliant commentary on the phone. The second investigation is thanatological: where do our dead go? Where can we find them? Louise sets cinema on the trail of her mother. She looks for her in the eyes of her father and brother, in the words of the friends she interviews. One of them, poet Louise Warren, explains that mourning is an opportunity to descend into oneself, where we get to “meet our soul, our vital spark.” Supported by the camera, Louise Chevillotte descends, and if the innermost being becomes the space of the most universal sharing, it is because here mourning is not an ordeal to be endured, but a source, the origin from where cinema springs towards its fantastic truth. Where is Cécile Chevillotte? Some say “everywhere,” while others say “nowhere.” She is in the bottomless thickness of the image where Louise and her father’s gazes meet, in silence, by the fireside. Deep down inside, Louise Chevillotte has found a way of framing and not framing that gives each shot, whether composed or taken on the spot, fixed or hand-held, a solid and unadorned density, a humble and stripped-down depth. We can feel the director’s inner drive and care, guess the shooting process, every step of the way, with a rare combination of courage and modesty. Each shot vibrates but none shakes. It is because without ever seeming so, the film reaches the very heart of cinema, of its own poetics: it is by conveying the acute sense of passage, of the fleetingness of things, that the image becomes the place where they can be saved. “The unaccomplished buzzes with the essential”: this other verse by René Char, engraved as an epitaph on Cécile Chevillotte’s tombstone, would be a perfect epigraph for such a film.

Cyril Neyrat

Interview

Louise Chevillotte

You’re known as an actress in cinema and theatre. Did the intimate subject of your film prompt you to move into directing?

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.

The idea of a space to think about someone, or to find them again, is introduced in the prologue and later echoed in the words of Louise Warren.

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.

“Si nous habitons un éclair”: René Char’s verse becomes the thread of a film that unfolds as both a metaphysical investigation and an intimate journey with your loved ones. How did you conceive its structure in writing, alongside Sabrina Delarue and Yuna Alonzo?

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.

Poetry, as well as painting and photography, are very present. What were your guiding principles in working with these elements?

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.

The film also includes testimonies from your family and friends. You give these voices an important place.

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.

Certain sequences show you performing rituals. What meaning do they hold?

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.

The film carries a unique life force.

“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.

How did you approach the film’s artistic direction—its image and sound?

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.

There’s no music in The Heart of Eternity, except for the piece composed for the end credits. Why this choice?

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.

Interview by Olivier Pierre

Technical sheet

  • Subtitles:
    English
  • Script:
    Louise Chevillotte, Sabrina Delarue, Yuna Alonzo
  • Photography:
    Louise Chevillotte
  • Editing:
    Yuna Alonzo
  • Music:
    Léonie Pernet
  • Sound:
    Ange Hubert, Romain Ozanne
  • Production:
    Marine Arrighi de Casanova (Apsara Films)
  • Contact:
    Yasmine Ben Njima