Une fleur à la bouche

The beauty of flowers is generally thought of as bringing joy. Not so in this melancholy film, which uses them to talk about illness, impending calamity and death, taking a two-pronged approach to this end. There is the documentary observation of the hustle and bustle at a flower market in the Dutch town of Aalsmeer, where each day millions of cut flowers are flown in from Africa, sorted, grouped into bunches in a fully automated process, transported in cage trolleys through huge halls and sold on a large scale, showing flowers as objects of global trade and making the ecological insanity of their industrial exploitation all too clear. A fictional scenario is then placed alongside it, freely adapted from Luigi Pirandello’s 1923 play about the man with the flower in his mouth, a metaphorical reference to a tumour. The question of individual fate in the face of mortality thus comes into sharper focus. In a conversation with a stranger at a bar in Paris, the precise observation of everyday details and the power of words and the imagination are revealed as the man’s strategies for staying connected to life. The same applies both to him and today’s global crises: time is running out. (Birgit Kohler)

Éric Baudelaire, born in 1973 in Salt Lake City, USA. Following his studies in social science, he established himself as a photographer and visual artist with numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions. Since 2009, he has made several films that have been shown at major international festivals.

Production Sylvie Pialat, Éric Baudelaire. Production companies Poulet-Malassis Films (Paris, France), Les Films du Worso (Paris, France). Director Éric Baudelaire. Written by Anne-Louise Trividic after The Man With a Flower in His Mouth by Luigi Pirandello, Éric Baudelaire after The Man With a Flower in His Mouth by Luigi Pirandello. Cinematography Claire Mathon. Editing Claire Atherton. Sound design Éric Lesachet, Philippe Welsh. Sound Éric Lesachet, Philippe Welsh. Production design Roy Genty. Costumes Edgar Fichet. Casting Valerie Trajanovski. Assistant director Elsa Amiel. Production manager Damien Grégoire. Co-producers Lee Joondong, Zsuzsanna Kiraly, Thibault Carterot. Co-production Jeonju International Film Festival, Flaneur Films, M141, Proarti. With Oxmo Puccino, Dali Benssalah.

Films: 2011: The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images (66 min.). 2013: The Ugly One (101 min.). 2014: Letters to Max (103 min.). 2017: Also Known as Jihadi (99 min.). 2019: Un film dramatique (114 min.). 2022: When There Is No More Music To Write, and other Roman Stories (56 min.), Une fleur à la bouche / A Flower in the Mouth.

Bonus Material