Official selection
Director's Fortnight, Cannes 2019, Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival 2019
Director
Blaise Harrison
Writer
Mariette Désert, Blaise Harrison
Cast
Léo Couilfort, Thomas Daloz, Salvatore Ferro, Emma Josserand, Néa Lüders, Nicolas Marcant
Producer
Lionel Baier, Estelle Fialon
Cinematographer
Colin Lévêque
Sound Designer
Olivier Touche
Composer
ELG
Editor
Gwénola Héaulme, Isabelle Manquillet
contact
Les Films du Losange
Official website
Once upon a time in the Pays de Gex, on the border of France and Switzerland… P.A., a rather shy teenager, finds his place with a tightly knit group of friends who roam the city on bikes like the kids of ’80s cinema, experiment with soft drugs like those of the ’90s, and try their best to handle the first pangs of teenage love — in other words, they’re like everyone else. Where things flip: One hundred metres below their feet is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. A huge and spectacular machine with cosmic designs, it causes the collision of protons to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang and so, perhaps, discover the unknown particles that make up the universe. The seasons are progressing, and with them, adolescence is accelerating and reality is gradually falling apart. Is something strange happening in the Pays de Gex, or is it just... growing up?
Revealed in the Directors’ Fortnight (a parallel section of the Cannes Film Festival, which hosted MANDY in 2018 and was heavy on genre cinema in 2019), LES PARTICULES, Blaise Harrison's first feature film, joins the rich tradition of rites-of-passage stories with shades of the supernatural. Coming from the documentary milieu, the Swiss filmmaker mixes the tropes of science fiction and adolescent drama perfectly here, staking his story on the terra firma of truth (the particle accelerator) to better insinuate the otherworldly. From Charles Burns to John Carpenter, so many influences are captured and perfectly metabolized over the course of a surprising coming-of-age chronicle in which reality itself (and the particles that constitute it) assumes an allegorical quality. A stormy and ethereal memory: an incandescent vision of adolescence lived in remote areas, at the borders of space-time... and of adult life. – Translation: Rupert Bottenberg
Showings
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