Société Acéphale

A murder investigation is flipped inside out in Burak Çevik's second feature, a spellbinding and surprising work that questions whether we can ever truly understand criminal motives. We begin in the present as an unseen narrator recounts the assassination of his lover's disapproving mother, accompanied by hauntingly vacant images of urban alienation and garish city lights; we then flash back to witness the first encounter between the lovers-turned-accomplices, their mutual attraction and world-weariness emerging across a sleepless night and morning after. Çevik imbues the proceedings with a stylistic confidence and willingness to bend the conventions of cinematic form to arrive at a complex, gripping double meditation on love and death.

A club in Paris. Driving techno beats sweep everyone away. People dance, consume and talk. Félicie meets Saïd and takes him to her place for an afterparty. On the cusp between night and day, different lives and views collide.

“We’re not training people to be fighters, we train people to exert energy and to release”, says the trainer at the 'Calais Jungle' boxing club. A few days before the camp’s eviction, energy levels are sky-high. A throbbing documentary impression of a tenacious support group.

The Voyager probe is about to leave our solar system. At the same time, on Earth, Alain Diaw begins his first day of work in a prestigious automobile company. He has come a long way and is also aiming for the unknown.

Riccardo is fascinated by Jeffrey Dahmer, a famous American serial killer. He recognizes himself in this man, a homosexual like himself, for whom he feels a love that he has never felt in his own life. I travel with him to Milwaukee, the city where Dahmer committed his murders, to film him as his encounter with reality puts his fantasy and our friendship to the test.

In a remote village, young Luka has already seen the worst. His father's disease and a very close relationship with his mother have made him the man of the house. During the male nurse's daily visit, an unexpected invitation to have lunch awakens his jealousy. He decides, then, to bring his own guest. Freely inspired by Georges Bataille’s childhood.

Thomas, a Swiss-German musician, is stuck at home because of a broken foot. He wanders around his tiny Parisian flat, his leg in a plaster, busy composing a new piece. At sunrise, an unexpected female visitor is showing up for him at the door.

In southern Japan, the erupting Sakurajima volcano dominates and threatens to devastate nearby towns and cities. From there, Pierre Carniaux asks his friend Yusuke Oba what he would miss most if every­thing were to vanish.

Marta, Luc and Charlotte, aged twenty-five to thirty-years old, have a lot to share in the city of Paris: friendships, demands and refusals. Ideas grow in the occupied university departments. THE EPISODES - SPRING 2018 is so singular in its approach to existence and so sovereign in the way it establishes its own language that all attempts at defining, assigning a genre or a previously identified aspect of film, are doomed to failure. All we have to do is open up the dictionary: after all, that was Ponge’s reaction when confronting the unknown. « Episode. A work’s division including several parts, each forming a self-sufficient whole. A more or less striking moment in a lifetime. A set of actions, of events forming a whole and making up a striking moment in history or time. »