Lamp
A lighthouse guardian leads a young prince towards an imaginary world, Taxandria, where the boy learns about the power of love and the value of liberty. A totalitarian regime has forbidden time: time watches have been confiscated, photo cameras are illegal as they freeze a point in time. A typical Servais theme: a power is oppressed by a constraint that denies what is best in the individual, and therefore has to be twisted in various ways, to establish an entirely artificial world, that has rules that may question some of the rules of our world at this side of the mirror.
The film records a day in a supermarket in the Brussels region. The story of this day's little events, both comic and touching, provides the general framework of the film. The situations which are conveyed through an accumulation of quick, light touches, highlight some of the ways we behave in connection with food, the repetitive element in our gestures and movements in this everyday, enclosed world which is so familiar. The film is based on the observation of a supermarket and the people who shop or work there. More and more of their various personalities emerge in the course of the day. They all have their importance: we get to know them from the outside, like people in a group photo where each has his own place. All these individuals cross each other's paths, meet each other, bump into each other again and fill in the framework of the film with a many-sided tableau.
