Le Pays lointain

Le Pays lointain "is the story of failure, the story of what we wanted to be and weren't, the story of what we saw slipping away (...). We talk again, we imagine what our life will be like, we think we see it before us, and little by little, living it, we slowly look back on ourselves, we observe the road we've travelled, the slow and certain distance that led us to where we are today, from the distant land from which we left".
In this last text, written in 1995, the year of his death, Jean-Luc Lagarce recounts the uneventful story of a man in the France of the last twenty years, the encounters, family, friends, loves met and experienced, work and adventures.
"Lagarce, like Proust and Chekhov, is a writer who knows he is doomed. Hence his attachment to life and his absolute necessity to restore its essence. Before it's too late. This need permeates Lagarce's writing: to tell, to speak, to touch, to wound, to kill, to move and to love.
It is above all this aspect that touched me, perhaps even more than the beauty of his language, his elegant modesty, his subtle precision and true dignity. And his humor, without which we couldn't go on reading, couldn't go on living."
At the back of the set imagined by Rodolphe Dana, scratched images, shot in super 8, unroll their saturated colors in an attempt to recall to oneself a time sought and lost.