2024 – Digital 4K – 17 min (Experimental Short Film) / Cinema Povera

Synopsis
A flower held in its seed since the 19th century decides to go out and discover our world. This new birth confronts it with the vision of a possible end. The wilted flower represents the natural, perpetual, cyclical time of living things, while the burnt flower represents the time of contemporary humans, who are destroying the planet and life itself.

Statement
Memories of a Burnt Flower is a film project exploring the speculative subjectivity of a flower—Nigella damascena—when confronted with the question of species extinction. The minimalist narrative poetically follows the fertilization process of this flower, made famous by Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs in the first half of the 20th century. This film is about believing in cinema’s ability to re-enchant the world. It invites viewers to reconnect with ways of thinking that lie outside Western rationality. This approach is part of contemporary ecological practices which, with the help of biosemiotics research, seek to create new methods of cooperation and communication with plants. It is also about using anthropomorphic processes in a critical, creative and non-anthropocentric way, in order to move plants from the status of object to intentional subject, while at the same time questioning the boundaries of our human identity beyond the separation of nature and culture.

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with Camila von Hein and Vincent Jondeau
Music: Atlas Glaas
Sound Design: Sinan Varis
Color Grading : Rémi Vauthrin
Writing, Directing and Editing: Vincent Jondeau

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—  2024 | Screening “Xylem / Xilema” – Biophilia Festival Internacional de Cine (Mexico/MX)