L'Héroïque Lande (FID 2017) attested to this with panache: fire and escape are the primary
elements of Nicolas Klotz and Elizabeth Perceval's cinema. Based on
from a Faulkner short story poeticizing the escape of a slave from Brazzaville to São
Paulo to Barcelona, Nous disons révolution sets the present ablaze in four
four movements called "races". Before being a hope for a sick world
world, the revolution is first and foremost that of a cinema practice. It
It takes place in the editing room, where Klotz and Perceval use all their strength: on
and between the fragments of a material that is both heterogeneous and stubborn, gathered over the years
and stubborn material, collected over the years, from travels and encounters, is grafted with a bouquet of texts and
and music which, when rubbed with the images, light the fuse of revolt. Klotz
and Perceval have learned from Deleuze that one can also run, flee in place.
This is called dancing, becoming a flame: one's own revolution. Some
men and women dance, long and feverishly. The dance of the bodies
bodies becomes a filmic trance, the flight is heightened into a fugue with braided motifs
and restarted from race to race. The men who do not dance speak,
recite, tell their stories for and with the filmmakers. And, dance or speech, it is in this way of sharing
is in this way of sharing the space and time of work, of making cinema in common - a common
in common - a common - cinema, in the loving abandonment to this sharing that the
the film acts politically. To the point of making us experience a processional samba
the streets of São Paulo as a manifestation of collective power
inalienable power. Carried away by this power, it is then the film itself
which seems to flee, to overflow its own limits. Between fable and document,
improvisation and composition, between anger and joy, all borders burn.
(Cyril Neyrat)

Screenplay: Nicolas Klotz, Elisabeth Perceval.
Image: Nicolas Klotz.
Editing: Elisabeth Perceval, Nicolas Klotz.
Music: Ulysse Klotz.
Sound: Mikael Barre.
Production: Bertrand Scalabre (Unexpected Films).

Filmography:
Pariah (2000), The Wound (2004), The Human Question (2007), Low Life (2011),
The Heroic Heath (2017), Fugitive Where Are You Running? (2018),
Saxifrages, four white nights (2021)

Film by Elisabeth Perceval and Nicolas Klotz selected for the FIDMarseille-Festival International du Cinéma de Marseille, 32nd edition