After years of directing shorts and collaborating with Jean-Luc Godard on his final films, Swiss director Fabrice Aragno will premiere his feature debut at the Locarno Film Festival. Le Lac, a 75-minute work starring Clotilde Courau and Bernard Stamm, premieres in the festival’s Concorso Internazionale section, and we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “A woman and a man throw themselves into a sailing race lasting several days and nights on a large lake. One would like to cross over, yet one cannot, one misses any sign of life, yet life is perceivable in the rushing tide, in the blowing of the wind, in the drifting clouds, in the solitary cry of birds. One must delve deep into oneself and feel the heart-ripping that nature imposes.”
“We would like to cross over to the other side… but we cannot… Nevertheless, we can hear the voice of this life in the roar of the waves, the breath of the air, the passing clouds, the lonely cry of the birds,” notes Fabrice Aragno.
Arango also spoke with Variety, saying, “I’ve worked on my own with short films, but this project is unusual because it’s a feature film, it’s not a documentary. It’s between the two. The story is quite simple. It’s about a couple who want to feel again. Everyone is quite distanced, the world is like this. You don’t know the truth any more, everything is behind glass, the glass of the screen. These two people need to throw themselves into the real, into the truth. The film expresses this, going from fiction to real, to human, to animals, to bodies, to impressions. The story is not the main point, it’s mainly about expression using all of what cinema can do in image and sound. I’m using everything I’ve discovered with Godard, playing with the freedom of image and sound. It will be a real spectacle cinĂ©matographique.”
See the trailer below and learn more here.