Private Project

Water Ways

« In front of the deep water, you can choose your vision; watching the still bottom or the current, the bank or the infinite; you have the ambiguous right to see or not to see, you have the right to live like a boatman or to live with a new race of fairy (…). The water fairy, mirage’s guardian, holds all the birds of heavens in her hand. A puddle contains a universe. A dream moment contains a whole soul » Gaston Bachelard. Water and dreams. Essay on matter’s imagination, 1941

This video installation is a disconcerting sensitive experience, a journey through the theme of water and reflection and based on collective imaginary. The underwater shooting creates singular poetic moments in which the normal perception is deviated.
This video installation was created in a public swimming pool, with common swimmers, free divers, and dancers. We asked them to tell us a story, a souvenir, an emotion they experienced through the contact of water. Then those stories were choreographed underwater with them.

Water, source of life, purifying, healing, protecting, regenerating; it is also destructive, threatening, born from a magic and primitive world, filled with creatures. Those scenes create a kaleidoscope of perceptions and states we can experience through the contact of water. Each of us is invited to plunge into one’s impressions, memories, and imagination.

Mirror effects, light and shadows create a poetic journey. Images and space are multiplied, offering the oblique reflection of the world, in search of converging points between reality and imagination.

Esta película es un caleidoscopio de las percepciones y estados que se pueden encontrar al ponerse en contacto con el agua. Imágenes y espacios son magnificados, ofreciendo un oblicuo reflejo del mundo, en busca de puntos de convergencia entre realidad e imaginación.

  • Servières Jessica
    Director
  • Jessica Servières
    Writer
  • Antoine Manichon
    Producer
  • François Ramstein
    Music
  • Bermond Gilbert
    Editing
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Les Eaux de là
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    14 minutes 48 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 15, 2015
  • Production Budget:
    10,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    France
  • Country of Filming:
    France
  • Language:
    French
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • European Heritage Day
    Aubervilliers
    France
    September 14, 2015
    Screening in a Public Swimming Pool
  • Athens exhibition for Transmission Art Festival Athens – Karlsruhe
    Athens
    Greece
    April 18, 2016
    Romantso Gallery
  • Backup Festival
    Weimar
    Germany
  • FICMA - Festival Internacional de Cine con Medios Alternativos

    Mexico
  • Voices from the Waters International Traveling Film Festival
    Bangalore
    India
Director Biography - Servières Jessica

Director of photography and camerawoman on numerous feature films and documentaries, Jessica Servières was also supervisor of the Arts, Sciences and technology Platform at the House of Social Sciences – Paris from 2013 to 2015. She is now a qualified member of the council for digital life in the Seine Saint-Denis.
She had directed the documentaries: Ici, Tout le temps, about a shanty town in Marseille, south of France; Zaouia about trans ceremony in Algeria; Les Eaux de là, an immersive video installation in a public swimming pool.

Jessica Servièreshas a particular interest in the modern places that question the sense of belonging to a place and to an identity. With the collection MurMurs, she caught in several cities in the world, characters swallowed by the city, by the urbanism of « over-modernity ». The series titled Fleurs de Cité is about women, their perception and use of public space which she gives to show and ear in a urban route.

She develops her projects through the encounter with a territory. In between collective and individual consciousness, with a view to reaching a lay audience and making them co-authors, she questions what makes common sense.
Her films and photographies are usually showed in unusual spaces : screening in the street, in a public swimming pool, diptych video, large-framed photographies in the street, interactive sound installation…
Trying to make viewers look at every day life in a different way, from somewhere between close and far, reality and fiction, she emphasizes the complexity of human kind through the singularity of individuals.

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