– Meeting with the Belgian director to talk about her atmospheric coming-of-age, a film she wanted to make to show a deteriorating world
(© Alice Kohl)
Meeting with the Belgian director Banu Akseki. Discovery with his short films Dreams of a Maid and thermal bathsshe is releasing this week in Belgium through her production company Frakas Film her first feature film, Without sun [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Banu Akseki
fiche film]with Louka Minnella, Sandrine Blanche and Asia Argentoan atmospheric coming-of-age, portrait of an adolescence in search of meaning lived in a pre-apocalyptic world where the threat of a sun in rebellion hovers.
Cineuropa: What are the origins of Without sun ?
Banu Akseki: After my two short films, I wanted to make a film where I could show a deteriorating world. Not so much an end of the world as this decay of the front. I didn’t necessarily know at that time what the causes would be, but the desire was there, and then quite quickly this duet between a mother and her son emerged. From there, I started thinking about the sun. How its disorder could have a cosmic, almost divine echo on the psyche of the characters. It seemed to me very exciting to invent a world, even close to ours, in the process of disintegrating, of degrading. A world that would be gnawed by a cold melancholy, which spreads little by little. Only human warmth can cope with it, but this too is gradually disintegrating.
Even though the ecological subtext is obvious, the film ultimately focuses on exploring people’s reactions…
Yes, especially since we never really know the origins of this evil, it remains unclear. We don’t even really know if solar flares are really responsible for it. Opinions differ, some choose to ignore evil, others to embrace it. A community is born, which decides to live underground. What to do in the face of an invisible evil? Either we are in denial or we accept. We live with it, we try to protect ourselves, but there is not really a logical explanation. It imposes itself on the characters. When there is no answer, it is quite logical to bring a presence of the mystical, which offers a form of hope to find the light, the heat.
How did you think of the film’s trio, between the son, the missing mother, and the fantasized mother?
When I started the writing process, which turned out to be very long, I read a lot of 19th century fantasy stories, often about lost loved ones. My main character sees a kind of ghost reappear, resembling his lost mother, who comes to haunt him. We see that in Bruges la morte for example. The hero is haunted there by his beloved who has died, and whom he sees reappearing in the streets of Bruges, he then begins to follow her, caught up in this apparition. We find this motif in the film. Here we cannot strictly speak of a ghost, but there is nevertheless a character who will grab Joey in spite of himself in another world. This relationship, of course, is doomed. A door is open to another world, and we wonder if Joey will stay there…
What is the place of the fantastic and the genre in both at the time of writing and in your desire for the film too?
I didn’t technically start with the idea of writing a genre film, it just came about. It’s true that my first two short films were much more rooted in reality, and here I wanted there to be something that wasn’t necessarily fantastic, but in any case of a disturbing strangeness. Solar flares exist and can have consequences, but reduced. For the moment. The consequences had to be amplified, and the anticipation and the fantastic arrived with this amplification. For the rest, it’s very close to the world in which we live.
The trouble also comes from this pre-apocalyptic impression, in a world that strongly resembles ours, especially with the pandemic, which I imagine was not originally planned…
Oh no, it was not planned, that’s for sure. But I think that all science fiction films can have echoes with what we experienced, it was so extraordinary.
It is above all the dynamics between the characters that evoke what we have just experienced…
Yes, there are people who oppose it, those who believe in it, those who are in denial. And the unexpected creates tension.
There is also a drug circulating, what is its meaning? Is it an alternative to some form of spirituality?
In this kind of society, one can imagine that drunkenness becomes a sort of great help for the characters, who find in it a remedy to forget their melancholy and their pain. This idea of a state of altered consciousness was present from the beginning of the writing, I wanted trance scenes, where we see them dancing, forgetting themselves. This drug is an important element in finding this state, this mystique, almost. Maybe it’s a way to rise? And then there was the visual intuition, that the drug would pass through the eyes, and the tears.
There is a real minimalism in the narrative and visual aesthetic of the film, in which moving characters are immersed.
Joey is a walker, he is caught by the ghost. From the beginning, I had in mind a character who walks, does not know where. The scenario itself is quite minimalist, not a lot of things happen, the character’s journey is punctuated with little things. My intuition, aesthetically, was the handheld camera. We are not in a very smooth image, it is rather a little rough, I wanted to be able to anchor this world of anticipation in our reality. And then the film is divided between this daytime world and the nocturnal, underground world. The world above is made up of interiors with large bay windows, the underworld revolves around night scenes, essentially. The lighting comes a lot from the decor. The inspirations for this underground world are refugee camps, mole people or tunnel people, homeless people who live in tunnels, often in subways, who go out very little, if ever.
Can you tell us about the very organic work on the sound?
It was important for me not to drown the whole film in the waves, I wanted to break them down into several layers. I wanted to allow the viewer to reach a state of contemplation. It is a film that is more than narrative, it is immersive.