A video installation in equal parts documentary and sci-fi fable. A project that explores the symbolic form of the omen.

"This is the retirement home, the house of amnesiac oracles and blind seers, where people come for answers but where no one knows what will happen..."

That is how Collette, 86, introduces us to her retirement home at the beginning of the film at the heart of the installation. It's where people at the end of their lives meet and take us into their worlds. In the exchanges that make up the film, one question keeps coming back. "How do you see the future?" The archetype of the visionary oracle, the living depiction of wisdom, is summoned in order to reflect on and subvert projections that surround our imaginings of the elderly, particularly here, where they are kept at a distance from the world.

This film was developed in the summer of 2023 as part of the Transat program of summer residencies at Ateliers Médicis.

An exhibition of two intimate and political series, one of which has never previously been shown.

"In film, I have yearnings to make documentaries, but every time I set out on that path, somewhere along the line, I veered toward fiction. I wasn't feeling the form, I couldn't find the film. In photography, I take things from life. I capture moods, moments and people."

Alongside his activities as a filmmaker and author, Alain Guiraudie is also a poetic, gimlet-eyed photographer. The represented scenes are, nonetheless, nothing more that what they show, a record of everyday occurrences, revealing timeless provinces and urban outskirts in the raw. He presents elsewheres whose familiarity is not however tinged with oneirism.

With thanks to the Gourdou Boué family for making Hôtel de Bruée available.