Quentin Faucheux-Thurion

In an abandoned warehouse, a crowd is dancing as one on 145 BPM techno music. Among them is Dustin, a young transgender woman and crew: Felix, Raya and Juan. As the night draws on, collective hysteria morphs into sweet melancholy, and euphoria into yearning for tenderness.

Alba, an artist-in-residence at the Casa de Velázquez, struggles to find her place in the world and in her own body.

In a brick house at the heart of a Rio favela, Sueli yells, scolds, consoles. Matriarch of a noisy clan, she watches over her children and grandchildren, unfazed by the gunfire bursts that set the pace of daily life. Around her, sudden deaths multiply, the children grow up, and the house keeps changing, shaped by never-ending repairs. Still, Sueli holds her ground.

This summer, Livia returns to spend a few days in the family apiary. Louis, her elusive and brilliant brother, is also back.

In this night-time road movie, Paul Heintz pursues his work on the edge of reality (Foyers, FID 2018), delving deep into fantasies and their sometimes ambivalent virtues, the better to undo the coercive power of which they are sometimes also the instrument. Here we’re with three friends one hot summer’s evening somewhere in Saudi Arabia. A city, and in the distance, a monumental fountain, a phallic spurt if ever there was one. And as we begin to make out its gushing spray of water from afar, to alleviate their boredom, the three young women embark on a verbal joust with, at its heart, the word nafura.

Filmmaker Paul Heintz sets off in search of Winston Smith. When he publishes a classified advert in the English newspaper The Sun searching for namesakes of the hero of George Orwell’s novel 1984, he causes a collision between fiction and reality. The daily life of these illustrious strangers becomes dystopian, absorbed by the imagination of each and every one of us.