Stéphane Breton

At the end of the road lies a track, the very last, a track swamped with the mud of a Siberian autumn, and at the end of this track lies a vast, dark forest which secretes those who have made this their final refuge, in hamlets that fray a little more with every passing day, sapped by misery and alcohol. We have to travel as far as we can, and be prepared to fall into the ditch, to see what makes us human.

At the end of the road lies a track, the very last, a track swamped with the mud of a Siberian autumn, and at the end of this track lies a vast, dark forest which secretes those who have made this their final refuge, in hamlets that fray a little more with every passing day, sapped by misery and alcohol. We have to travel as far as we can, and be prepared to fall into the ditch, to see what makes us human.

At the end of the road lies a track, the very last, a track swamped with the mud of a Siberian autumn, and at the end of this track lies a vast, dark forest which secretes those who have made this their final refuge, in hamlets that fray a little more with every passing day, sapped by misery and alcohol. We have to travel as far as we can, and be prepared to fall into the ditch, to see what makes us human.

At the end of the road lies a track, the very last, a track swamped with the mud of a Siberian autumn, and at the end of this track lies a vast, dark forest which secretes those who have made this their final refuge, in hamlets that fray a little more with every passing day, sapped by misery and alcohol. We have to travel as far as we can, and be prepared to fall into the ditch, to see what makes us human.

Russian people are passing before us during an endless train journey in winter. We lose ourselves in their speeches, gestures, faces, eyes. Anecdotes turn into admissions. Memory invades the compartment and seizes the empty spaces of the present. The train continues through the snow, cold and grey fog… An infinite film existing somewhere between the ephemeral and the eternal.

In a small valley in Nepal, at the end of a path worn out by so many feet and so many centuries, two old shepherds escape fromt their village to climb the mountains: shit everywhere, purity of heart, bedazzlement.

Shot like a western without a gun, at a drunkard’s distance, the film takes place in New Mexico among an ancient Spanish community eaten to rack and ruin by rust, beer, and dust storms.

Focused on his neighbours, Le Ciel dans un jardin continues the conversation, begun with the previous film, which is imbued with melancholy in the face of the impossibility of returning. This future mourning gives a particular colour to his observation, a combination of indifference (the repetition of the days governed by the principle of subsistence) and acuity (the contemplation of small things and of lost moments). The value of the shots finds itself enhanced, from the tactile close-up that captures the elementary actions—cultivating, eating, smoking—to the widest frame, espousing with a final gaze the frontiers of world that is about to be incorporated by the filmmaker as an interior landscape, a mental object. - Emmanuel Chicon

Shot behind the scenes, from the point of view of a subjective camera, the film shows the ethnologist’s ambiguous relations and negotiations with the people of his village in the mountains.

Shot behind the scenes, from the point of view of a subjective camera, the film shows the ethnologist’s ambiguous relations and negotiations with the people of his village in the mountains.