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2024 / DCI 4K / 10:45
In California, around 172,000 people are homeless, or 30% of the country’s total, even though the state represents only 12% of the US population. Lack of affordable housing, mental health problems and drug use are the main causes of this social crisis. This human distress is everywhere these days, but it’s far from trivial. I met a few homeless people when I was in the town of El Centro, and they were kind enough to let me film them. I captured a few moments of their daily lives on the edge of Interstate 8 and the Sonoran Desert.
2024 / DCI 4K / 11:30
At the beginning of January 2024, I travelled to southern California to film the border territories. In Jacumba Hot Springs, the wall is discontinuous because of the rugged mountainous terrain; more and more people are crossing illegally at this point. On both sides of this porous barrier, the border patrols seem overwhelmed. I meet a group of migrants, mostly young men, and then discover two temporary camps. They come from Latin America, but also from China and Pakistan. Migration crisis? Climate refugees?… Here, cartels run a lucrative human trafficking business, selling them an uncertain American Dream.
2023 / DCI 4K / 11:00
Owens Lake lies to the east of Sierra Nevada mountain chain in California. The Paiute tribes called it Patsiata. This body of water once covered an area of 280 square kilometres and had an average depth of 12 metres. The first explorers in the region reported that it sustained abundant aquatic life. Agricultural irrigation, followed by the diversion of the Owens River to the Los Angeles aqueduct, caused a gradual drop in the water level, until the lake dried up completely. Owens Lake was transformed into a vast arid and desolate plain; when the desert winds blew across the deposits of soda ash, huge dust clouds formed. Sand storms became a problem as toxic particles gave rise to respiratory diseases among the populace. To keep this under control, gravel was spread across the basin and the sediment kept damp. Today, nearly half of the aqueduct’s water is rechanneled toward Owens Lake in order to re-start plant growth in the lacustrine clay and restore the depleted ecosystems. Ponds have been created for migratory birds.
2022 / DCI 4K / 05:00
Dollar Tree is a short reflection on the themes of consumption, pollution and poverty. This video was filmed at a garbage dump on the San Carlos Indian Reservation in Arizona, one of the poorest Native American communities in the United States. Dollar Tree focuses mainly on the problem of plastic pollution. Widely distributed in stores and supermarkets, plastic bags have a negative impact on the environment. They are found almost everywhere, because they fly away easily, accumulate on the sides of roads and in waterways. They are dumped in large quantities in landfills that occupy vast lands and take years to decompose. Plastic bag waste is also a danger to animal health since animals often mistake it for food and consume it, thus blocking their digestive processes.
2021 / HD / 17:45
Anomie was inspired by the disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. It also concerns the excesses of capitalism, which have brought us to an unstable and uncertain period in history. Neo-liberal policies and economic globalization have exacerbated the social inequalities we see today. As its title suggests, the video explores the concept of anomie – in the broadest sense of the term – developed by Émile Durkheim. This concept defines the state of a society characterized by the disintegration or disappearance of shared values and norms. Periods of anomie are chaotic and often laden with conflict. Among human beings they produce feelings of disconnection, alienation, worthlessness and futility. The result is a state of disruption that can lead to despair and deviance. The current pandemic has transformed our individual and collective rituals. The social distancing measures imposed by our governments have altered many aspects of our collective life. Will these changes turn out to be reversible, and what will be their impact on society? In the aftermath of this public health crisis, will we be living in a state of anomie?
2020 / HD / 11:50
This video explores man-made landscapes and the effects of human intervention on the environment. The work draws a parallel between the lush golf courses of Palm Desert and the desolate landscapes surrounding the Salton Sea. It investigates how water is used in California, where water rights are among the state’s divisive political issues.
2019 / HD / 20:00
This video was filmed in Australia, in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. The title refers to “Dreamtime” as the central theme of Aboriginal culture. In their conception of the world, all forms of life are part of a dynamic system of complex interactions. The earth, men, animals and plants are only parts of the same whole.
2019 / HD / 23:25
This experimental video was filmed in the polluted waters of the Staten Island boat graveyard. Located near the former Fresh Kills landfill, these toxic shores have been affected by floods, coastal erosion and by Hurricane Sandy.
2016 / HD / 36:00
In former times, Salton Sea was a very popular tourist attraction and a paradise for fishing aficionados. Nowadays, the forlorn landscapes surrounding it seem to mirror a lost America, of an era in which everything seemed possible and accessible for all citizens. These sites give us another, unflattering image, that of a nation more divided and unequal than ever. They are like those other areas of dire poverty that are to be found all across the United States, a Third World of their own, where the most destitute live, for lack of a better alternative.
2014 / HD / 09:50
Mirages was filmed in a residential development on Montreal’s South Shore and in the surrounding agricultural lands. We are gradually transported from one site to another, going from a fertile meadow to a desolate construction site. Transitory spaces appear, ephemeral places are set up; these metamorphoses evoke the urban sprawl that replaces rural life with suburban conditions. Those landscapes in mutation reflect the upheavals affecting our living environments and our ecosystems. They hold a mirror to the illusion of having the capacity to build when we do not even have the ability to dwell.
2013 / HD / 08:45
This video probes our relation to water, underscoring both its vital importance and the troubling recurrence of industrial disasters and the contamination of water bodies.
2012 / HD / 10:45
Recent technological changes have transformed natural and rural environments, to the point of producing uniform, ever-more polluted environments in their stead. Uprooted probes these territories fashioned by man, deciphering in them his relationship to his environment, thereby questioning his ways of being. Critical of environmental and urban developments, this video explores the peripheries of some North American cities, strangely alike from one to the next, in that none of them feels like somewhere. Their excessively wide spaces, standardized and shapeless, generate a sense of uneasiness. Urban upheavals can turn the most familiar locale into an unrecognizable, anonymous, even forbidding place. On this blank slate, local memory is forever erased.