“To be incoherent means to have faith in cinema. It means to have a romantic approach , unformatted, free, disturbed and dreamlike, cinegenic, an epic narration.” —Bertrand Mandico

An enthralling voice within a new, resolutely queer and transgressive film scene coming out of France—which also includes MUBI favorite, Yann Gonzalez (Knife & Heart)—Bertrand Mandico crafts films that are as defiantly off-the-wall and as they are mesmerizing. Like his many shape-shifting and gender-bending characters, his films are provocatively slippery. As soon as you think you have a grasp on them, they fall away and transform into something else entirely.

An outlandish and self-styled provocateur, in 2012 Mandico co-authored the "Manifesto of Incoherence’’ with Icelandic filmmaker Katrín Ólafsdóttir, calling for films that emphasize artifice and incoherence, that flirt unfaithfully with different genres, and crank up the sensory immersion using expired film stock or in-camera optical effects. Eschewing realism entirely, Mandico draws instead on the iconography of dreams, fairy tales, and disturbing urban folklore, while demanding performances from his cast that consciously veer between the spectrum of minimalist restraint and wild overacting. Like the lost French brother-in-cinema of Guy Maddin, Mandico’s films are ripe with psychosexual surrealism and grotesque absurdism: an exuberant celebration of cinema’s many chimeric possibilities. To celebrate the release of After Blue (Dirty Paradise), we invite you to dive head-first into the dizzyingly camp and phantasmagoric fantasy worlds of Mandico.