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Une fleur à la bouche

A Flower in the Mouth
Forum 2022
© Poulet-Malassis Films - Les films du Worso
The beauty of flowers is generally thought of as bringing joy. Not so in this melancholy film, which uses them to talk about illness, impending calamity and death, taking a two-pronged approach to this end. There is the documentary observation of the hustle and bustle at a flower market in the Dutch town of Aalsmeer, where each day millions of cut flowers are flown in from Africa, sorted, grouped into bunches in a fully automated process, transported in cage trolleys through huge halls and sold on a large scale, showing flowers as objects of global trade and making the ecological insanity of their industrial exploitation all too clear. A fictional scenario is then placed alongside it, freely adapted from Luigi Pirandello’s 1923 play about the man with the flower in his mouth, a metaphorical reference to a tumour. The question of individual fate in the face of mortality thus comes into sharper focus. In a conversation with a stranger at a bar in Paris, the precise observation of everyday details and the power of words and the imagination are revealed as the man’s strategies for staying connected to life. The same applies both to him and today’s global crises: time is running out.
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by Éric Baudelaire
with Oxmo Puccino, Dali Benssalah France / Germany / South Korea 2022 French 67’ Colour World premiere

With

  • Oxmo Puccino
  • Dali Benssalah

Crew

Director Éric Baudelaire
Written by Anne-Louise Trividic, Éric Baudelaire after “The Man With a Flower in His Mouth” by Luigi Pirandello
Cinematography Claire Mathon
Editing Claire Atherton
Sound Design Éric Lesachet, Philippe Welsh
Sound Éric Lesachet, Philippe Welsh
Production Design Roy Genty
Costumes Edgar Fichet
Casting Valerie Trajanovski
Assistant Director Elsa Amiel
Production Manager Damien Grégoire
Producers Sylvie Pialat, Éric Baudelaire
Co-Producers Lee Joondong, Zsuzsanna Kiraly, Thibault Carterot
Co-Production Jeonju International Film Festival Jeonju, Republik Korea
Flaneur Films Berlin, Deutschland
M141 Paris, Frankreich
Proarti Paris, Frankreich

Produced by

Poulet-Malassis Films

https://baudelaire.net/ https://baudelaire.net/

Les Films du Worso

Photos

Éric Baudelaire

© Marco Abram Locarno Film Festival

Born in 1973 in Salt Lake City, USA. Following his studies in social science, he established himself as a photographer and visual artist with numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions. Since 2009, he has made several films that have been shown at major international festivals.

Filmography

2011 The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images; 66 min. 2013 The Ugly One; 101 min. 2014 Letters to Max; 103 min. 2017 Also Known as Jihadi; 99 min. 2019 Un film dramatique; 114 min. 2022 When There Is No More Music To Write, and other Roman Stories; 56 min. · Une fleur à la bouche (A Flower in the Mouth); 67 min.

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2022