Children of the Flood (En cours de post-production)

I was inspired to make this film at a time when I was overwhelmed with apocalyptic thoughts and readings. I was lost in the face of the collapse that is promised to come. But I didn't want to deal with that thing directly. I only wanted it to be a kind of landscape. But not like an apocalyptic landscape. Just a landscape of a promised "end of the world". And I wanted this landscape not to be a real landscape. But rather a virtual one. Just images and sounds. One day I came across the short story The End of Aaron by David J. Poissant. I wanted to use the pretext of Aaron's illness, which is called eco-anxiety. I wanted to use it to evoke the great uncertainty. But it is especially the character of Grace, the girlfriend, who made me want to make this film. I imagined my daughter in a few years. As a teenager. Or at twenty years old. Her first loves in this landscape of uncertainty. I wondered how strong her first young adult desires would be in the face of the impossibility of seeing tomorrow as a certainty. I wondered about the place that would remain for imagination, dreams and poetry.
I wanted to tell the odd, passionate and tragic love story wich unites Aaron and Grace. A couple with only one horizon : a place as unexciting and as little generator of desire than a cellar in which images of the end of the world are constantly broadcast. I wanted the particular story of his two strange lovers to be interspersed with news flashes and anxiety-provoking documentaries that evoke the universality of the big troubles to come. This was one of the main challenges of the film's sound and image editing : to make the world exist inside this cellar.
I wanted a flat, cold setting with a lot of very tight shots on "the faces of the present". Grace and Aaron locked in the basement before "the end of the world". I wanted to contrast this confinement with the wider and warmer shots of flashbacks and nature around. I wanted to transcribe the dichotomy of hope and demission wich mark the human beeing at the individual scale, like Grace and Aaron, and at the worldwide scale too, with the pervasiveness of collapse's facts and the inconsistency of actions in the face of these facts. I wanted to show the frailty and the strength of the two characters who seem lost in Aaron's cave like on a desert island as if the disaster has already been. Aaron is not a mad visionary man but rather a man like any human beeing condemned to see the world come undone right under his nose. And Grace tries to save her last love when his world falls down around him, like if it was the last man alive.
I didn't want to make an eco-friendly film. I didn't want to highlight the weirdness of the state of the world. I just wanted to link this weirdness with the destiny of two young lovers swimming in troubled waters, alone and abandoned like threatened species. I wanted to use "romantic" flash back, and clichés of teenage love stories to show an ordinary young couple of human beeing and, then, to highlight the poetry and the weirdness that could be a love story of an endangered species.
Aaron symbolizes all the darkness, the despair, the pessimism of the time regarding the future of the world. My idea was to try to understand to what extent life and desire can remain. To what extent remains a breath of creation in such a darkness. I didn't want to tell the story of the birth of a saving energy that would come from this darkness. I didn't want to show the emerging desire to create a better world or the emerging desire to look for alternatives to the system that destroys everything. I wanted to see what it would be like to succumb to nihilism and darkness. I wanted to talk about that : to experience beauty, poetry and love in the midst of despair. In the passivity of despair. To show the tragic vanity of these two beings. Totally passive. Who propose almost nothing. Who remain locked up in a cellar to wait for nothing more. I wanted to confront this passivity of despair with what seems immortal and inexhaustible: poetry and creative energy inherent in a youthful love.
I wanted to show the devotion of a human beeing in love. To show the way Grace is trying to give pleasure and to heal her lover. A way wich sounds desperate but so humble and true. She is so mysterious and so mysteriously in love. Aaron is dark and negative, when she, Grace, seems bright and positive. I would like the viewer to ask what makes her fall in love with Aaron. What is it that attracts her to him ? Is it the idea of death ? Is it just the desire to save a thing ? Or is it the desire to sink with a body as in a last act of beauty ?