Le Jardin

Directed by Ousmane Sow.

A concert of sounds and voices accompanying a multiscreen projection that recreates the progress of a collective memory. The plants and characters appearing on the various screens are those mentioned by the different members of a same family evoking Tunisia and Algeria, their Jesse's Garden. Pictures and sounds are manipulated in order to reproduce the memory process: obsession, reminiscences, transference, fading remembrances, changing impressions, or sudden illumination.

Arrived in an abandoned place or emerged from a society at a standstill, men and women organize themselves in their own way, borrowing what they find on the spot and in the memory of what surrounds them, the theater and the people... In the superb mineral setting of the Boulbon quarry, Philippe Quesne, inspired by a work by the painter Jérôme Bosch, orchestrates a joyful retro-futurist epic to meet the worlds to come, between environmental science fiction and contemporary western.

Filmmaker's visual diary during her visit to Samarcande.

French couple Jean and Marie go on their honeymoon in Jean's hometown in Africa. They end up in the middle of a tense political situation as soon as they arrive and must spend the night in hiding. Jean begins to take on some of his father's old French colonialist attitude, which comes into drastic conflict with their current situation. As they struggle to stay alive, Marie rethinks her marriage to Jean.

This film from the human fascination with immortalié stone, described by Roger Caillois in his book STONES. A cult of the stone has a long history in Asian countries like China and Japan. Moving from the mountain to the sea, the film unfolds like a dream incantatory which is the theme: In China, a mountain of Tséchouan, it is said that there was once a stone that had children. Beyond their age difference and the distance between them, those who dream of one stone are in constant contact. Fascinated by the same stone, their thoughts, their gestures, their desires end up merging. One day they will be reunited in a garden called the Garden of the ages. It describes the garden as the meeting in the same place and the same time the four seasons of life: the birth of spring, summer childhood, fall of man becomes an adult, the old man winter. This garden is both in and out, like a large house containing its own garden.

Short film.

In Paris, near the end of World War II, crotchety professor Fernand Bonnard maintains a zoo and continues his research. He's a coward, as is his debonair son, Armand, who has one daughter, Philippine. On her eighth birthday, Armand picks her up from her repressive boarding school and takes her to Fernand's to celebrate. Father and son quarrel, and Armand leaves, only to be arrested and shot for violating curfew. In grief, the curmudgeonly Fernand does not tell Philippine, but invents a life for Armand as a captain of the Resistance. Fernand takes her from school to live with him and his sensible wife. Along the way, Philippine finds out the truth and Fernand discovers courage.

The moon shines, a young couple plays in the forest. Their game leads them to an unfamiliar garden, in the middle of a clearing. Unaware of danger, the young lovers enter the maze of a garden at midnight. Little by little, they are submerged by a intoxicating spell. They lose themselves in the strange labyrinth. Will they manage to break the spell that keeps them prisoner?

Filmed by Jean Eustache for the television program, Les Enthousiastes, Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights presents a series of unstructured observations, free associations, and interpretations on the third panel of Bosch's well-known oil on wood triptych.

A woman mourns the loss of her mother.

The film retraces the atypical journey of Gilles Clément, gardener and landscape architect, but also a writer. Marked by ecology, he questioned the art of gardens at the end of the XXth century, with the garden in movement, the planetary garden or the third landscape.

Set in a Referendum torn Quebec between two languages, between two cities drawn between two cultures, a young immigrant tries to find his way while simultaneously dealing with the loss of his own father.

Focused on his neighbours, Le Ciel dans un jardin continues the conversation, begun with the previous film, which is imbued with melancholy in the face of the impossibility of returning. This future mourning gives a particular colour to his observation, a combination of indifference (the repetition of the days governed by the principle of subsistence) and acuity (the contemplation of small things and of lost moments). The value of the shots finds itself enhanced, from the tactile close-up that captures the elementary actions—cultivating, eating, smoking—to the widest frame, espousing with a final gaze the frontiers of world that is about to be incorporated by the filmmaker as an interior landscape, a mental object. - Emmanuel Chicon

A Pierrot-like elf enjoys the delicate flowers of his frost garden.