A Project Down the Drain

Still rummaging through old hard drives, I found this:

Image

It's the poster for a short film project that was supposed to be produced – we had France 2 and a co-producer – but it never materialized.

It was based on a true story (?) that I had read in Planète magazine:

In the 1970s, a group is seated in a circle in a community hall for a workshop. At the end of the session, two men enter; nobody is expecting them. They walk toward one of the participants to ask him "were you sitting in this chair?" The participant nods.

The two men then bring in a cart with a television and a VCR to show him a video. They are researchers and, a few weeks earlier, they filmed an interaction with a person in this very same room.

In the video: "Can you tell us something about one of the participants in the workshop that will take place here?" The person, who turns out to be a psychic, goes through all the empty chairs until stopping at one in particular. Voice-over: "The subject has indicated chair no. 9."

The psychic then begins to make revelations about the future occupant of the chair, which the participant in question follows on the television screen, stunned.

In my version, this was only the first layer of the story. The second layer was that the psychic's statements, while impossible to verify, sowed discord between the young woman (sitting in chair no. 9) and her father who was also present, ultimately forcing her to admit a truth she had always hidden.

Or how the false (or the undecidable) can have real consequences.

Down the drain. For now.