A MOVIE BY MARGAUX CHATAUX

CREATIVE FILM – 26′
with Grégoire Eloy, Myriem Karim & Laure Winants

© Margaux Chataux, 2021.
2021

MARGAUX CHATAUX

Résidence 2021

After Marjorie Calle with Diana Alice Lea in 2016, Clémentine Carrié with Les Jours – Cahiers photographiques in 2017, Nestor (also known as Noé Cuéllar) with 1+2=4 in 2018, Citizen JiF with The Future Was Yesterday in 2019, Pauline Broulis with Trois Iris in 2020, Margaux Chataux was the creative filmmarker of 2021 in partnership with Occitanie films (26’). 

In the form of a cross portrait, Margaux Chataux’s film will accompagny the three photographers during their two-mont residence. Gr goire, Myriem and Laure will pace up and down the Pyrenean landscapes and their surroundings, in search of images and meaning. The exterior landscapes that will resonate throughout the film will reveal their interior landscapes. Through their artistic expressions, the photographers, supported in their research by scientists, will try to translate into images the seemingly static matter, which evolves and transforms with time and the impact of human being. Faced with these immensities, the trio of photographers will share a few snippets of the emotions they feel when confronted with their subject, and tell of their intimate relationship with their medium, photography. "From the plain, the Pyrenees are part of the landscape. Static, immobile, they seem to have always been so. Grégoire, Myriem and Laure have taught me that the mountains move. The glaciers move. The rock bends. The snow changes colour. The air evolves with the passing of time. Nourished by the collaboration with scientists and the data collected, the photographers went to visit the mountain. It was then that I started to walk in their wake, along the steep, snowy paths. I think we were looking for the traces of time: the geological time of the mountains and the visible and invisible impact of climate change. Then it was the time of the film that I started to look for, this time punctuated by our slow steps, by our looks and our understanding of the territory. The film was built around these walks and the peregrinations of our eyes. I chose to adopt a different aesthetic for each photographer. During the shooting, I adopted a moving camera, with which I became one with, to follow Myriem. I then worked on the notion of immobility, with a frozen camera in the image of my body numbed by the cold, alongside Grégoire. The third aesthetic that came to the fore, with Laure, is that of the night, during which the invisible is revealed before our eyes. It is because the photographers move differently in space and work on different terrains that the form of the film follows their singularities. To accompany our walks, I asked them to read their workbooks and their inspirations. A few snippets of the intimate link with their subjects are then revealed, at the same time as the notebook opens. The title of the film Regarde, la montagne bouge (Look, the mountain is moving) evokes the notion of point of view. From the plain, if we think that the Pyrenees are immobile, in reality, on the paths, the mountain moves and makes us move with it."

 

BIOGRAPHY:

Born in Paris in 1995, Margaux Chataux is a filmmaker. After a technical and artistic diploma of image (BTS Audiovisuel des Arènes, in Toulouse), she specialises in film direction and was graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieur d’Audiovisuel (ENSAV) in 2018. 

Her approach is on the edge of a realistic and dreamlike look, that sometimes is able to create hybrid works. With her first short film, Je ferai tout disparaître (2018, awarded at the Festival International du Documentaire Emergent and selected at FID Campus), she shares the intimacy of moving out of her childhood home. A year later, her second short film El so de l’aiga (2019, awarded at the Prague International Film Festival) tells the intimacy of a pregnancy, that of Aïda, writing letters to her child. 

In 2019, argaux Chataux is participating in the Sahara lab creative residence in Morocco. A photographic film Sous les astres, la marée was born from this experience. The film reveals the hidden movements in the tide, the buried cemeteries and encounter in the desert. 

Her next projects are based on intimacy and combine a documentary approach with a poeticisation of bodies and landscapes. 

She lives and works in Toulouse. 

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EN