Lisière

Who hasn’t secretly wished—held onto the comforting thought in a quiet corner of their mind—to leave everything behind and take refuge somewhere in nature? To start over. To erase the traces of a death-driven civilization and imagine something else. That feeling that if we just get far enough away, our futile needs will disappear, along with the anxieties that accompany them. That our contemplative, blissful, hard-working nature, in harmony with the living world around us, will miraculously resurface, and we will be saved. Even death will no longer feel threatening. A unification with the landscape. Everything will then be good and beautiful, and the children we raise will splash around in the river, recognize birds by their songs, and invent enchanting music…

Of course, all this is but a comforting thought we hold close when everything is falling apart, because we know full well that nothing is ever so simple, and that conflict, tension, and suffering are inherent to the human experience. And yet, some utopias still manage to make their way into the light, taking root just as much beneath city concrete as in a remote forest.

With Lisière, filmmaker—and Tënk France’s artistic director—Éva Tourrent offers a luminous and delicate film, in which she generously shares her visits to a hillside space built and inhabited exclusively by women. There, they construct and restore wooden cabins, share time and knowledge, encourage each other’s liberation, and experiment with new forms of expression. Alongside these visits that nourish her reflections on her body, her choices, and her longings, the filmmaker explores her desire for motherhood.

Lisière is a film woven from questions, uncertainties, and moments of doubt—and yet, it makes us want to believe in fairy tales. A very particular kind of tale, where the fairies belong to themselves, celebrate without fear, and where the final moral tells us to burn down capitalism and patriarchy.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director