Experiencing Interruptions?

The Flame

A dark sea slowly begins to move.
What first appears as a black mass gradually reveals itself as water.
Above this shifting surface, a man walks holding a fragile flame — echoing the crossing from Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Between sea, fire and time, the film unfolds as a slow passage from darkness toward light.

  • Christophe Schaeffer
    Director
  • Christophe Schaeffer
    Writer
  • Christophe Schaeffer
    Producer
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    La Flamme
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Runtime:
    23 minutes 42 seconds
  • Production Budget:
    10,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    France
  • Country of Filming:
    France
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital 4K
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Black & White and Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Christophe Schaeffer

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.

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Director Statement

The Flame begins in near darkness. What first appears as an abstract black surface gradually reveals itself as the sea — a living mass, breathing slowly in the night.
Above this moving darkness, a narrow band of image shows a man walking with a candle in his hand, echoing the famous scene from Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkovsky. The fragile flame persists while the sea continues its slow movement below.
What interested me was the encounter between these two temporalities: the human gesture, fragile and deliberate, and the vast organic duration of the sea.
Little by little, the landscape emerges. The black surface becomes water, the night becomes day, and the sound of the sea finds its body in the image itself.
The film does not seek revelation but attention: a space where time can unfold slowly, where fragility and persistence coexist, and where light is born from darkness.