TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES
Raymon Depardon and Claudine Nougaret |
© Palmeraie et desert
Empty Quarter, une femme en Afrique
Raymond Depardon
1985 - France - 1h25
A journalist takes a few days rest by the Red Sea. In the lobby of his hotel, he meets a distraught woman and suggests she should share his room. She accepts. He looks at her. He will try to fall in love with her as slowly as possible. She follows him on a journey that takes them to the desert, the Nile and Alexandria.
Raymond Depardon refers to the film as a “necessary” madness following a difficult break-up he experienced in Asia. For his first feature film, he embarked on the adventure with a few lines of script broken up over many territories, inventing the film in the course of the peregrinations of the team and himself. His approach is radical. To evoke a man's obsession with a woman, he decides not to show the body of the man, who is only present through his voice-over and the woman looking into the camera. The woman is played by Françoise Prenant who also edited the film with Jacques Kebadian.
CAST AND CREW
Cast : Françoise Prenant
Screenplay : Raymond Depardon, François Weyergans
Editing : Jacques Kébadian, Françoise Prenant
Production : Double D Copyright Films, FR3 Films Production
French distributor : Palmeraie et désert