Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Pierre Tonachella films not only to return to his childhood home in Essonne, but also to find in the work of cinema a raison d'être equal to that of the friends who stayed behind. A fragment from Schiller's letters, one of four literary excerpts that punctuate the film and provide a middle ground between the poetic and the political, suggests that return is a compass for aesthetic education. Far from sterile nostalgia, this compass points both to fidelity to origins and to a path for the future. For a long time, this vision has revived the collective, collaborative form of Jusqu'à ce que le jour se lève (presented at Cinéma du réel in 2018) after a film dedicated to his poet friend Théophile Cherbuin. Familiar faces are reunited, and each enters the film without introduction, through varied stagings that project shared memories onto the stage of the game, while the space left vacant by the biographical narrative is invested by words from other times and places. In praise of friendship, an intimate attachment to the land and a documentary on a proletarian, contemporary rurality, all come together in the exercise of an attentive, open, precise and free gaze. Closer in this respect to early Guiraudie or Creton than to Bruno Dumont, this vision echoes the words of Mahmoud Darwich: “This is the strength of poetry: there is no last poem. The horizon is open. The path to poetry is poetry. There is no last station, not even God. [...] If we knew what this poem was, we'd write it and be done with it.” (Text: Antoine Thirion)

Pierre Tonachella was born in 1988. He grew up in a village in Essonne, then studied philosophy and film theory in Paris before devoting himself to documentary filmmaking. His work blends the intimate and the political, and is often made with people close to his village. He also writes poetry.