Mon voyage d'hiver

"“Here, you see that even lightness is work.” Mon voyage d’hiver, the second “European film”, is an initiatory return undertaken by Vincent Dieutre and his godson, Itvan, to the real Germany, via Tübingen, Dresden, Weimar and Berlin, and its imaginary counterpart, through the territories of "Mitteleuropa". A melancholic trip across landscapes that feature "the still sharp violence of history", visible in the snow-covered décors bathed by the sunset haze. All accompanied by the music of Winterreise that Schubert composed in 1827, inscribed into the film by interludes in the studio, where Andreas Staier and Christoph Pregardien – uncontested performers of the Austrian composer’s work – can be seen playing. The film, in a state of white depression, offers a one-way transmission between a hyperconscious and romantic grown man and a mute adolescent. The latter, a metaphorical body conjugating history in the present or in the future, flees at the gates of Buchenwald in an ambiguous moment of voluntary amnesia that rings out like a gesture of survival and seems to carry the promise of deferred re-appropriation."
(Emmanuel Chicon)