Jean-Baptiste de Laubier's Spectre: Sanity, Madness & the Family is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries—including the United States, United Kingdom, India, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, and Canada—starting October 26, 2022, in the series Debuts.
For the longest time, Spectre: Sanity, Madness & The Family was an impossible film to make. I had been collecting footage of my family for more than twenty years, while trying to write a proper fiction script with the help of Céline Sciamma. I always had a feeling that these two activities would eventually merge.
But my obsession with documenting our everyday life turned out to be more relevant than I had thought. As I was investigating our past, I kept stumbling upon dark areas and began to realize that many of my unanswered questions were, in fact, secrets. That’s when fiction became less necessary, but the film itself became essential.
Had I not interviewed my mother, revisited certain places, and shed new light on old pictures, I would be a different person today. Making this film changed my life and so it did for my brothers, sisters, and, more importantly, their children. For the first time in my existence, I experienced how relevant the process of making art could be, how strongly the realm of dreams could impact the real world. Intuitions leading to untold forms, then shifting into truths.
On this dangerous path, some of my relatives lost their sanity. The mask of fiction gradually became mandatory for our protection. Jean is not my actual name. But the cult I’m talking about is real. I walked that thin line for a few years with the help of my friends, and now we have this film. I’m sorry that it turned out to be as confusing as this written introduction, but I found no other way.