Nearly twenty years ago, Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré searched for wild flowers in their natural environment in Northern India in L’Arc d’iris, souvenir d’un jardin (2006). After seeing the film, British botanist Mark Brown, who has devoted his life to recreating a primeval forest in his own garden in Normandy, expressed the wish to collaborate with the filmmakers on a similar project. Sept promenades avec Mark Brown makes this idea a reality a year after Creton’s Un Prince (2023), in which Brown appeared speaking to students (including Antoine Pirotte, the young cinematographer of both films). Divided in two parts, this “phytocentric road movie” first includes seven sequences where Brown casually leads a small group who are scouting for Indigenous plants in places abandoned by human activity while sharing his ecological knowledge and convictions with them. Shot digitally, it naturally transitions into a second part shot on 16mm entitled “Herbarium”, which showcases the previously collected plants and flowers. It is strangely moving to see Creton, whose body of work is associated with digital images, tap into celluloid and thus the origins of cinema, like plants turning toward the light and blooming in pure photochemical delight. (Antoine Thirion — Viennale)