Départ
A woman sits in a train, looking at her phone.
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Christophe SchaefferDirector
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Christophe SchaefferWriter
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Christophe SchaefferProducer
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Project Type:Experimental
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Runtime:3 minutes 27 seconds
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Country of Origin:France
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Country of Filming:France
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Shooting Format:Digital 1280 × 720
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Aspect Ratio:16.9
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Film Color:Black & White and Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
Christophe Schaeffer is a French multidisciplinary artist — writer, poet, philosopher (PhD), visual artist, and lighting designer. His work spans theatre, contemporary dance, visual arts, music, and cinema, exploring perception, time, and the fragile boundaries between image and presence.
Since 2022, he has developed a body of experimental films extending his research into moving images. His cinematic practice revolves around duration, slowness, and the vibration of reality, often using extreme slow motion, long focal lengths, and mobile phone cinematography.
His films have been presented in international festivals and artistic contexts, and pursue a form of poetic cinema of attention, where images remain inhabited by gesture, silence, and lived experience.
Départ begins with a very simple situation: a woman sitting in a train, absorbed by her phone while an announcement signals the imminent departure.
Suddenly another presence enters the film — the music and image of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. A gaze appears, and a silent dialogue seems to emerge between the woman and the character from the film.
What interested me was this uncertain zone where cinema and reality overlap. We cannot know whether the woman is watching the film, whether the film is appearing on her phone, or whether it simply invades the space of the scene.
The image becomes a place of crossing: two films, two gazes, two temporalities briefly meet.
Between the everyday moment of waiting in a train and the emotional charge carried by cinema, the film explores how images inhabit our lives — sometimes consciously, sometimes without us even noticing.
