Boyuna was filmed in the Baumettes prison with a group of trainee inmates participating in the Cinéfabrique programme. Could you tell us about the origins and the context of its making?
The project was conceived as part of the National Center of Visual Arts’ grant scheme, “Walden, videographer at work!”, which invites, twice a year, a filmmaker to lead a creative residency with group of detainees from the Pre-release Support Unit (SAS) of Les Baumettes prison.
This twenty-day long residency is supported by the Lieux Fictifs association, which has been working for over thirty years on film creation and transmission with people deprived of their freedom. It takes place at the Studio Image et Mouvement, a unique space for film training, creation and diffusion implanted within the SAS at Les Baumettes, where prisoners nearing the end of their sentences can develop artistic projects revolving around cinema, watch films, meet professionals and receive training.
In my case, the residency was thought around the audiovisual training, provided by La CinéFabrique school, to a group of nine inmates. This training comprises multiple educational modules dedicated to screenwriting, directing, acting coaching, amongst other things.
This film was co-written with the group. What ideas did you bring to the table to start with, and how did this collective work plan out?
When I began to envisage an initial writing proposal, I quickly thought of the Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel Plan d’évasion. In this fantastical tale, set around 1913, the warden of a prison, located on an island off the coast of Cayenne, leads physiological and psychological experiments on a group of inmates. His aim is to enable them to experience a sense of freedom whilst keeping them locked in their cells.
Taking this premise as a starting point, I imagined a sort of fictional prolonging. In an alternative time frame where such an experiment could have truly taken place, one could envisage a never-ending evolution of mental escape technologies within prison institutions, right up to the present day and even beyond. I then imagined that in 2135, at Les Baumettes, a group of scientists would have developed a highly advanced device in which escape could be achieved through the alteration of sound perception. Their discoveries would reveal that certain soundscapes could create an access to an inner space of freedom. The most powerful of these sounds would stem from environments that have disappeared in this imagined future.
Inspired by these initial ideas, we started the collaborative writing process. By way of exercises and writing games, we progressively imagined the narrative arc, the dialogues, the voices and the settings of the film. At the end of our collective writing process, our story is still set in 2135, in a post-apocalyptic world where most ecosystems and animals have disappeared, but we are no longer in Les Baumettes. We are in a sort of society or institution called Boyuna, which offers the survivors an escape into a natural world that has vanished, a world populated by dreams.
Were there any particular references that guided you during the writing and production?
I was specifically thinking of three films that were very much on my mind throughout the entire residency. The first one is La Jetée by Chris Marker, for its post-nuclear narrative, its interplay between time and memory, the presence of scientists and time-travel into the past. I often thought about its opening line: “This is the story of a man haunted by an image from his childhood.”
By extension, I also thought of Terry Gillam’s Twelve Monkeys. Last but not least, Total Recall by Paul Verhoeven also came to mind a lot due to its simultaneously futuristic and dreamlike quality. I enjoyed imagining that our Boyuna could be a subsidiary of Recall, the company that implants memories into its clients brains in the story of that cult film.
The film intertwines the prisoners’ dreams with environmental concerns. Did your background as a biologist influence the film’s narrative in this way?
Yes, absolutely. Ever since I began studying biology, I have been interested in the evolution of living beings, in their emergence and their disappearance within the vast cartography of all the possible forms of life. Speaking of which, my work as a filmmaker has always been fuelled by a quest linked to this fascination, and each of the sorties in my films is inspired by a sense of nostalgia born of the realisation that we are in the process of disrupting some of fragile balances that have governed our ecosystems for millennia.
The collective writing of Boyuna was also shaped by these concerns. The interns started thinking about their own feelings of loss, fear, apprehension or excitement regarding the living world, a world largely absent from the prison’s environment.
The visual style is very inventive. How did you develop it? What were the technical constraints?
Our narrative required the creation of four sets centred around this retro-futuristic world: the escape pod with the guinea pig and the scientists, the waiting room, the booth for testimonies and confessions, and finally the world of dreams.
To design each of these spaces, we held discussions with the trainees and team members, particularly Joseph Césarini, the studio manager and a vital technical support throughout the residency. Whilst setting up these decors, I was often amazed by the possibilities offered by the studio’s technical resources: the lighting work, the tracking shots, and even some relatively ambitious staging techniques.
For the escape pod, for example, we created a two-dimensional scene: in the foreground, the scientists surrounded by their retro screens; in the background, the guinea pig bathed in a magnificent blue light. To embody the dreams, we soon imagined a rear-projection setup using images from my personal archives, most of which were shot in the northern Colombian Amazon. Projected onto a white sheet, they became the backdrop for a shadow theatre in which the participants could move freely.
Several modes of expression intersect: there are fictional conversations, but also documentary accounts, and readings of fragments or poems. Where do these texts come from, and why combine these different modes of expression?
Right from the start of the residency, I suggested they undertake writing exercises based on their dreams of travel or exploration. Gradually, each participant built up a small collection of texts navigating between three themes: night-time dreams, dreams of freedom, and the most improbable fantasies.
This material enabled them, on the one hand, to imagine scenes for our shadow-puppet escapism installation. Thus, for example, Batsé, who loves gold and dreamed of going fishing with his friends, imagined catching a golden sea bream. Killian, who fantasised about being the richest man on earth, imagined entertaining his friends in a huge villa built on the edge of his private forest, once known as “The Amazon”. Mohamed, for his part, dreamed of being reunited with the dogs and the parrots waiting for him at home upon his release from prison…
Furthermore, these texts served as a starting point for the writing of the voices, poems and statements filmed in the interview booth. Written by the participants themselves, sometimes reworked collectively, they naturally blend several modes of speech. In the editing process, this material became an essential narrative layer, and maintaining this hybrid register between fiction and documentary, was an evidence.
In reference to the Tikuna myth that opens the film, the presence of animals becomes more and more prominent, first in the decor through which the characters travel and then in their immediate surroundings, in a state of near complete symbiosis with humans. Could you elaborate on this aspect of the film? At what point did the Boyuna myth come into play?
The presence of animals was at the heart of all our discussions about the script. My intention was to explore a worldview similar to certain animist cosmologies, in which animals occupy a fundamental place. We talked about totem animals, about what we might feel in the middle of the Amazon surrounded by unknown species, and even about the possibility of temporarily inhabiting an animal’s body.
These discussions gradually led us to incorporate animals into the narratives. Initially present in the dream sequences, they eventually impose themselves in the film, forming, like you said, an almost symbiotic relationship with the characters.
Once the importance of this animal dimension in the images, dialogues and narratives had been established, I began looking for a title capable of encapsulating the film’s various layers. The Boyuna myth then presented itself as the obvious choice. It allowed both to name the fictional society offering this escape service, to embody the transition between the real world, the imaginary world and the world of dreams that structures the entire narrative and, finally, to reinforce an animist cosmological dimension that particularly interests me.
Interviewed by Louise Martin-Papasian
