La volière, Long Call

Long Call explores the history of the ties between humans and orangutans through the relationship between Nénette – one of the world’s oldest captive orangutans – and Chloé, a performer who studies and mimics the gestures of the great apes. Together, they move through a jungle that is part fantasy, part reality – a dreamlike space where past and present interweave. The encounters they make along the way, with characters from different eras - a nineteenth-century naturalist, a primatologist from the 1970s, a zookeeper and zoo visitors from today – guide them through space and time, to the heart of the turmoil that has shaped relations between humans and orangutans for centuries.

For a few years now, I have been drawing orangutans at the Ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. I realised that there were other regular visitors too, whom the orangutans recognised and with whom relationships were forged despite the glass that separates them. One day, the former headkeeper of the zoo told me about his dream: to build a vast aviary-like enclosure containing a fragment of Borneo’s forest, where humans and orangutans could coexist. His dream of a shared space became the starting point of my film – a poetic and political way to explore interspecies relationships. Through digital visual technologies, I want to design this utopian “aviary”, free from the zoo’s system of separation and domination. A fictional territory where figures from the past reappear to question how science and colonialism have shaped our relationship with Nature – a legacy still present in zoos and conservation narratives. A dreamlike space to imagine new ways of cohabiting, placing at the heart of interactions mystery, vulnerability, and the unsettling nature of our relationships with the orangutan, a tension that has characterised them for centuries. I want cinema to inhabit this very strangeness – shifting the anthropocentric gaze and questioning how we coexist with other forms of life.