06: Virgil Vernier

4 April, 2019 - 20:00
SPHINX CINEMA

“Both for writing the sequences and recruiting the actors of my film, I need to immerse myself in the environments that I’d like to speak about... I’ve tried not to put myself in a moral position or a position of judgment in regards to the characters that inhabit my films. I can recognize myself in these lost people who seem to wander in the middle of a world that doesn’t provide any response.” — Virgil Vernier

In the presence of Virgil Vernier

Sophia Antipolis

Virgil Vernier
,
FR
,
2018
,
DCP
,
colour
,
98'

Sophia Antipolis

After his celebrated feature debut film, Mercuriales (Courtisane Festival 2015), which takes place in the Parisian banlieues, Virgil Vernier shifts his focus to Sophia Antipolis, a technopole in the margins of the French Riviera. In the midst of this strange landscape, where loneliness and desperation flourish under an oppressive sun, many men and women each seek meaning and togetherness in their own way. Their quest crosses with the fate of a young missing girl. Vernier’s attention to the surreal in the everyday and the mythological in the trivial results in a disquieting psycho-geographic portrait of the obscure, seamy side of modern capitalism, where prophetic visions and wandering ghosts thrive without resolution. “Sophia Antipolis proves that there are new voices out there experimenting with form, narrative and character, and finding new ways to address the political turbulence of the world, on the level of everyday experience.” (Jonathan Romney, Sight & Sound)