Can you tell us about the circumstances that resulted in this movie, for you and for the two friends you film?
Seven years ago, while I was staying in a hostel in Moscow, I began to dream about Normandy, inspired by Boris Ryji’s poem “The Sea”:
“He yearned to see the sea where all suffering comes to an end…”
After leaving Russia and spending two months in Istanbul, we arrived in Paris on May 20th 2022. After two months, I was feeling isolated and lost. To make myself feel better in France, to fight it, I had this pressing need to see Normandy at last, to do something that might free me, to take a new step, open up new horizons in my own life. What’s more, I’d planned to meet up with my friend Anton and his partner Katia there.
At the time, Katia was visiting her mother in Switzerland – she’d driven her there herself from Kharkiv a few months earlier. Anton, who’d just lost a leg because of his illness, had come to see the Gothic cathedrals and meet up with me in Normandy. It was his first trip since his operation. I got to Caen on 31st August, joined the next day by my wife Natacha Goncharova. Deborah Lennie had lent us her house in Caen where we got a good night’s sleep at last. Even though our future was still uncertain and we still didn’t have a stable home in Paris, this trip and the shoot had already given us a semblance of hope.
On September 3rd, we met up with Anton and Katia who’d travelled from Switzerland by car. The next day, we explored the Normandy coast, visiting Le Havre, Étretat and Dieppe, where we shot most of the film. When we got back to Caen, Anton and Katia went back to Russia and we went back to Paris, where we’re still living.
The two friends don’t appear until a third of the way through the film. Why did you decide to start the film without them?
It was a question of intuition, an ambition to discover something I didn’t already know. In the film, there’s an example of what I might call cinéma d’impression, in other words, filmmaking where we receive pure impressions from a precise moment, where the participants become the main subject of their own lives, made visible and reflected through a precise lens. The film serves as a motif, a third space, another dimension that’s neither documentary nor fiction, but manifests a presence. I didn’t know until the last minute whether Anton and Katia would be in the film, or how it would turn out, and I hadn’t given them any lines or directions.
A technique you use a lot is the fade, to the extent that sometimes we’re not sure if the sun’s suddenly hidden by cloud or if the shot is simply over. Why this choice?
For rhythm, for harmony.
You don’t use any music, and you’ve chosen to make your characters’ voices audible but only just, and they often compete with the noise of the ocean. Can you tell us more about your work on sound during the filming and mixing?
For the sound, I used recording material that could capture the entire sphere of sound, for deep, genuine immersion. It’s very simple: it’s a matter of transporting the area of the shoot into the cinema cleanly and intact. The sound design was also intended to express presence and to show how human beings are an integral part of the natural aural and visual landscape, where everything is equal. During the mixing, we kept all the sound editing I’d already done, by opening up the sound even further to achieve greater presence and the work’s musical harmony in all its purity.
Interview by Nathan Letoré
