Related Images is a column in which filmmakers invite readers behind the scenes, into their sketchbooks, or otherwise through the looking glass to learn more about their creative processes.
Nans Laborde-Jourdàa’s Boléro is now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries.
Dawn. Photograph by Matt Hill.
Boléro summons the spirits of my teenage years, spent in the Pyrenees, and the way we become ourselves in places that have little regard for our differences. Fran came into himself elsewhere, and as he returns, he yearns for reconciliation.
I wanted to show François Chaignaud on screen, how powerful a performer she is. Each and every movement she makes portends a future earthquake. I wanted to convey not only her art, but also her vulnerability and subversive impact.
I also wanted to show the landscapes in which I grew up, made of wildlife and concrete; show these dear faces, those of my family and my childhood friends. This film, for me, was one of those pastoral shows, beautiful and naïve, conjured up by villagers from the Pyrenees mountains on a summer evening, that combine theatre, dance, and songs. Donning the naïveté of the fairytale, Boléro tells the story of a character that turns into that of a community, where a craggy face, or the stroke of a stranger’s hand, reveals the promise of a dawning revolution.
Text collected by Thomas Fouet and translated by Aurore Kahan.
Cruising cartography: Les chemins égarés (The lost paths), 2017. Photographs by Amélie Landry. Texts by Mathieu Riboulet, novelist, and Laurent Gaissad, socio-anthropologist.
Scouting, set construction, and shooting. Men's room constructed in a desacralized church, summer 2022.
Performer François Chaignaud and butō dancer Akaji Maro in Gold Shower, 2020. Photograph by Adelap.
“La Tarara,” from Romances Inciertos, interpreted by François Chaignaud.
Off-screen / out of view, to be a voyeur: the camera is trying to capture Fran. Photograph by Manuel Bolaños, director of photography.
Charlie in fragments, Los Angeles (Nans Laborde-Jourdàa, 2019).
The Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971).
First day of shooting, hometown mall. Photograph by Thierry Gouirriec.