Wow! I've made it to the quarterfinals in both the Screencraft Fellowship and Emerging Screenwriters competitions, bringing The Stagemaster's total number of distinctions to FOUR!
This puts me in the top 7% on the English-language platform Coverfly, for those keeping track.
If you happen to know any producers on the lookout for international projects, now's the perfect time to introduce me to them.
By day, Alexandre is an editor and director whom I met when he came to work for ChezFilms.
By night, he is the creator of the YouTube channel Fry3000 (with nearly 5000 subscribers!), where he "dives into all sorts of cinematic oddities."
Every time he drops by the office, he returns from an interview with a former actor or producer of B-movies, or he goes fishing for information about some fanzine dedicated to a film I've never heard of but which he explains the importance of in the history of genre cinema.
And right now, Alexandre is deep in writing a booklet about Norbert Moutier – one of the greatest B-movie producer/directors – which will accompany a book of posters published by Serious Publishing. What, you don't know Norbert Moutier? No worries, Alexandre is also working on a documentary about him.
In the meantime, go support the book, it's the last day!
The feature-length documentary "To Build" that I produced and directed for École des Ponts et Chaussées will be screened at the Opéra Bastille on Monday, April 22nd at 7 p.m.
Meet the engineers behind the structures that have transformed France. How to build in the era of ecological transition?
Contact me if you'd like to attend, there are still a few spots available!
UPDATE: Oh, it seems it's fully booked =)
Culture night was less of a surprise this time since I had made reservations.
When I go see my friends' plays - especially in small venues where you can't hide - I always prepare a line to say after the performance in case I found it awful. ("You made me dream" Françoise Sagan would have said to Jeanne Moreau after a play where she fell asleep.)
I'm happy to say I didn't need it this time.
(I'm in a period where my friends are doing amazing things. This and this, for example.)
The play is simple, intimate, yet uncompromising. It progresses. The staging is delicate, made of small objects and gestures that you find here and there, telling a story. It was also an opportunity for me to see the journey and talents of someone I know making perfect sense within a personal and powerful play. Very moving. But rest assured: no need to know beforehand to appreciate it.
Oh, and also: you'll learn things (about Chile, about Louise Michel...) and you'll come out less ignorant. Which is not the case for most shows nor, let's be honest, for the majority of my films.
Tant que nos Coeurs Flamboient with Lorena Felei, written and directed by Laurent Contamin. At the Théâtre Essaïon until April 30th.
Awakened my typewriter for a new adventure. Had to follow through on my threats and add the exclamation point by hand. Totally worth it.
I'm definitely not the first to use emojis on a typewriter, but we can't be many either.
Following the Los Angeles Screenplay Awards, my feature-length screenplay The Stagemaster has just advanced to the quarterfinals of the 2024 ScriptLab Screenplay Contest!
This new accolade catapults me into the top 10% of projects to discover on Coverfly, one of the leading databases for English-language screenplays. Yeah!
There's something for scientists as well as beatniks. The common theme: reality isn't what you think. Let's dive in.
Starting with science: I stumbled upon Don Hoffman in this podcast by Lex Fridman. He's a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California. The thesis he defends in his book The Case Against Reality is simple: evolution doesn't care much about truth. Using models rooted in evolutionary game theory, he deduces that our perception of the world is biased toward survival. In other words, our brain wouldn't hesitate to ignore or distort the truth as long as it gives us an adaptive advantage. It's not its fault: it's been programmed this way over millions of years of evolution.
Therefore, a species that perceives all subtle variations of a signal could be disadvantaged compared to one that sees things in a much more binary manner (red = danger!) but much simpler to analyze in emergencies. In this race – like in many others – neither aesthetes nor poets survive.
On the beatnik side, it's been over a year since I've been progressing through the book Seeing That Frees by the late Rob Burbea.
I'd describe it as an advanced meditation book centered around the notion of "emptiness," which I've already discussed here. The central idea is that reality is much less real than we imagine. We're convinced that outside of our perception exists a "solid" material world that persists over time and continues to exist when we're not looking at it. Through a series of meditations focused on impermanence, attachment, and dependent arising, Rob Burbea shows that reality is partly an internal construction that builds and deconstructs under the impetus of consciousness. He teaches us to use different ways of seeing the world as tools that we can grasp and set down again to gain freedom.
To my friends, I sum it up in one sentence: "reality is made up of the thoughts you can't get rid of." The day I understood that, many things changed in my life.
Finally, between science, philosophy, and New Age, there's Why Materialism Is Baloney by Bernardo Kastrup.
Originally, Kastrup is a Brazilian researcher in computer engineering who has worked at CERN. When he wanted to develop a "conscious" computer program, he became interested in the problem of consciousness from a philosophical point of view and ended up with a metaphysical theory that brings idealism back into fashion. His idea is as follows: it is currently impossible to understand how matter creates consciousness – David Chalmers's famous "hard problem". So he turns things around: it's consciousness that creates matter. The laws of physics would no longer stem from the standard model but would be regularities of a shared consciousness of which each perceives only a part. According to him, we "think" matter into existence. It sounds a bit crazy, but his purpose is precisely to show, through reasoning resembling Occam's Razor, why it's "less crazy" than the materialist hypothesis.
Of course, we're diving into metaphysics here, so all of this won't immediately change how you choose your socks in the morning. But eventually, it should.
UPDATE: All these reflections have led me to imagine this film project that I'll talk about soon.
Originally, it's a soundtrack of a video installation by Pipilotti Rist, a cover of Wicked Game. Despite (or thanks to) its strangeness, I find myself listening to it regularly:
It starts off normally, then it goes off the rails. Just like my projects.
Keeping a journal boils down to one single activity for me: describing the obstacle.
What's blocking me right now? What's preventing me from being free, happy, and creative at this moment? What hidden snare is hindering the next step?
Two aspects are crucial:
Firstly, it's solely about describing. No finding a solution. No seeking to amend. I unearth the obstacle and examine it from all angles; I explore its ramifications within me; I ponder why it's blocking me now and in such a manner. And then that's it. Once the problem is brought to light, I let other inner forces take care of resolving it.
Secondly, it's an immediate obstacle. Something that's hindering my progress right now. I'm not trying to fix the situation for eternity. In this sense, the effort is neither theoretical nor intellectual; I'm solely dealing with what's present, operating under the assumption that subsequent difficulties will be handled in the same manner: in the present, as they arise – if they arise. We'll address the future when it arrives.
For this reason, journaling has been part of my daily routine for almost 3 years, and it constitutes an essential exercise to stay present.