Adieu

Two stories of parting and farewell. An illegal immigrant, arrested in France, writes his daughter a letter recounting the biblical story of Jonah. In the French countryside, an old man has just lost his younger son and has to work through his grief. This film raises a terrible question: what is the point of a world in which God no longer speaks to human beings? Through these two parallel and visually intertwined stories, the subtle dialectic of which reaches deep into the viewer, Arnaud des Pallières presents an infinitely complex, free and dynamic vision of the world, far removed from the linear representations of conventional cinema. To achieve this, he tunes images and sound not so much to the requirements of the narrative but to the shifting thought patterns that animate each sequence: “I am looking for a kind of ‘choral’ truth, stripped of protagonists and psychological depth, in which the movements and mix of ‘voices’ matter more than the performances of one or two ‘soloists’”.

Luciano Barisone (Translation BMP Translations)