Foudre

A film in four seasons by Manuela Morgaine

Music and sound design: Philippe Langlois

This film draws its source from the intensity of the real. It is the fruit of a two-year investigation in the fields of lightning. To that end its script includes images, places, faces and words of people whose reality has become material for
cinema. Only two actors, a man and a woman, run through the film.
FOUDRE is a legend.*
Under lightning, one does not know whether the images and sounds that strike us belong to reality or to fiction. I seek to render this phenomenal impression, at the moment when what we really have before our eyes seems surreal.
FOUDRE opens with a prologue, closes with an epilogue, and unfolds in four stories over four seasons within several centuries, between today and the eighteenth. One must therefore not worry about what does not “match”, neither in the weather, nor in the time that unfolds and is subject to jumps, nor in the film stocks that change, nor in the costumes that disturb the chronology of the periods, nor in the ways of speaking, nor in the spaces that lightning crosses at the speed of a flash, it that has this gift of ubiquity of which we all dream, that sometimes branches out over several continents at the same time. From one sky to another sky, capable of being all spaces, from France to Syria to Guinea Bissau, the sky is always there, as it is in itself, with all its variations of rites, seasons and moods. Lightning is unpredictable, strikes in every direction. This film is a continuous zigzag. The word zigzag comes from the German term that says the amorous back and forth. That is the movement chosen. Each impact from the sky carries with it a piece of a story. But by following them in fragments, one would end up imagining the whole and seeing the link, in the end, between each space, each time, each language, each rite, each atmosphere, each thing and each person. The model is the shape of the flash of lightning. It is the opposite of a straight line with a beginning and an end, and everything evolving slowly from one to the other. The end is already there from the start, rumbling. And besides, the film could be edited backwards. If we tell ourselves that everything exploded before it even began, this may help to understand all the pieces from the very beginning.