North American Premiere at the New York Film Festival
Q&A with Pierre Creton September 30-Oct 1
In the alternately blissful and forbidding French countryside, an enveloping, cross-generational saga unfolds among a young gardening apprentice and the three men training him, all of whom become instrumental in his professional tutelage as well as his sexual coming-of-age. Under the austere eye of filmmaker and farmer Pierre Creton, shooting in the pastoral environs of his home village in Normandy, this narrative, partly inspired by memories of his own teenage years, becomes a striking, anti-realist drama that balances the lushly classical and the marvelously absurd, told almost entirely through overlapping voiceover narration. Moving away from the more explicit balancing of documentary and fiction in his previous work, Creton here creates something entirely new and strange—a singular vision of a quietly eroticized natural world. Winner of the prize for best French-language film in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
