Summertime à Esparon, a 33-minute film directed by Martine Fougeron, places her family archive—Kodachrome slides, 16-millimeter film, and black-and-white negatives dating back to the 1950s—in dialogue with her own work.
Teaser: 2 ”
Awards:
2024 Berlin Shorts Award: Best Documentary Short
2024 Cine Paris Film Festival Award: Best first time director, short documentary
2023 Independent Shorts Award LA: Silver Award for Best Documentary Short
2024 Paris International Short Awards: Best Documentary Short
2024 ARFF Paris // International Awards: Official Selection
2024 Tokyo Short Awards: Semi-Finalist
Selected Film Strips
Tired of the crowds of vacationers on the Mediterranean coast, a French expat family in the 1950s seeks a more remote and ancestral place: Esparon, a small abandoned hamlet in the Cévennes mountains of Southern France. For a family alive to beauty and art, it becomes a devotional refuge whose restoration will take years.
Heading this colony are Georges Tonnellier and Pierre Fougeron, grandfather and father of artist-photographer Martine. Dedicated photographers armed with a Leica and Beaulieu R16, the men capture on the spot, with an incredible sense of frame, the solar moments of the lives that are dear to them.
From their mountain sanctuary the two patriarchs transmit their photographic sensibility and sensuality to Martine, who in the coming decades will explore future landscape of adolescence revealed by her own children, Nicolas and Adrien.
Alongside the musical theme, the Gershwin brothers’ “Summertime,” Fougeron narrates an archival tour that is both epic and private: four generations of observance and heritage.
Director's Statement
My idea for the movie Summertime à Esparon is to share a family novel in pictures.
My inspiration is to tell the story from my point of view as a granddaughter, a daughter as well as a mother.
Everything takes place during a single season: the summer holidays.
Everything is concentrated around a single place: the hamlet of Esparon in the Cévennes in the South of France.
Everything is focused on the same age: youth.
But this summertime unfolds, with strength and grace, from the 1950s to the present day, over four generations.
By mixing moving and still images taken by my grandfather and my father with their Beaulieu R16 camera and their Leica with my own images exploring the landscape of adolescence of my two sons, this film is for me a transmission that is anchored in an intimate genealogy. This theatrical dramaturgy and this gentle domesticity animate me.
Esparon is the mountain circus which rises like an amphitheater where characters and landscapes are staged.
In my work, I look for mysterious tensions between the spontaneous and the mise-en-scène.
Where the imagination is sparked.