Un pays en flammes

In den Wäldern des französischen Départements Landes gibt eine Familie die Geheimnisse des Feuers von Generation zu Generation weiter. Unter den Augen der Tiere lösen Tag und Nacht einander ab. Vater Patrick isst Gras. Tochter Margot explodiert. Das Kind Jean programmiert Firefly-Arrangements. (Pascale Ramonda)

If you’ve felt the magic of fireworks in person, you know that looking at photos and videos of them is never quite the same. In her debut feature, Mona Convert ambitiously refutes this idea to create A FIRELAND. This expansive, rhythmically driven experimental film connects the wizardry of master pyrotechnicians with the forest and farmland they live on in South West France. A FIRELAND loosely follows pyrotechnicians Margot Auzier and Patrick Auzier, Margot’s father, who, in real life, live in a village in the Landes forest in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. But Convert’s work is neither fully fiction nor fully documentary, partly staged and partly observational. There’s a certain inescapable magical, or perhaps supernatural, quality to the film, arising in both visual and audio form. (Cineurope)