A Girl from Ouessant
Éléonore Saintagnan
France, Belgium | 2018 | 28 min
World premiere
Language : French
Subtitle : English
At the tip of Brittany, the island of Ouessant—a grassy heathland swept by sea winds—is the last land before America. Given its geographical situation, it is a place that opens wide the doors of imagination. A Girl from Ouessant is an invented and, at the same time very documented, cartography of the island. This methodical statement starts as the diary of Éléonore Saintagnan, the resident artist-filmmaker at the Créac’h semaphore station, an ideal site for observing the surrounding area. Then, the account shifts towards a playful mise en scène, peopled with sailors’ wives, kelp burners, stories of little black sheep or countless shipwrecks… Drawing on the regional archives filmed in black and white dating from a time when the island lived mainly from fishing, the game begins. In a “If I’d lived in these times, I’d have been a sailor’s daughter…” style, the director takes us far away, to a world in which historical reality is nourished by personal mythology, to imagined places, and where, by projecting ourselves, we start to feel the salty sea spray on our face.
Madeline Robert
