CURA.

Here’s an excerpt of a dialogue between two young adults with a neurasthenic tone. It is part of Notre Héritage, one of the 14 short films of the thirtysomething French filmmakers Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel. This film’s main topic is pornography, but it asks the same question as some of their other films, such as Bébé Colère and La Fille qui explose: How to deal with what we inherit from our planet and our society as young adults? The innovative duet Poggi and Vinel are portraitists of their time. They created a gallery of characters aging together with them, who all have in common a high sense of the now through the vision of a world collapsing in front of their own eyes. Their latest 3D opus released in 2024, La Fille qui explose is one of their most extreme short films: the diary of someone feeling lonely in her suffering. The synopsis tells it all:

“For the past three months, Candice has been exploding every day. Sometimes even two or three times a day. Her record is seven times. She’s currently at 192 explosions in total.”

Candice’s body is a colorful mess of many textures, some kind of a strange Paralympic icon, even her heart is dangling outside her chest. She is composed of many characters of 3D assets bought on marketplaces emulating aesthetics present in social media like VRChat. Since Bébé Colère, Poggi and Vinel have been developing a singular and in-depth collaboration with 3D artists such as Lucien Krampf and Saradibiza.

“When I stopped being afraid I started exploding
What is my body trying to tell me?
We are so cut off that we need to be cut up to come together again.”

 Of course, La Fille qui explose ends as badly as it starts—no spoiler here—the end in their narration is the only goal, almost symbolizing some kind of new and tender beginning stripped from any trace of hatred. Jonathan Vinel talks about their inspirations for this opus, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the author of the book Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, interrogating for example, with a philosophical perspective, the Aurora theater mass shooting perpetrated by James Holmes during a screening of Batman. To quote Vinel: “You are so full of the world’s hatred that you cannot keep it inside anymore. Our character Candice has a good life, she succeeded, far from the reasons the media give for a sanctioning action. But she was so wounded by observing the world that she cannot contain this pain anymore, her sickness makes her explode all the time until she cannot anymore.”

Caroline Poggi elucidates: “These short 3D films are very close to an inner dialogue, not far from analytical practice, it’s a real necessity for us to tell all these things. Because these characters are almost artifacts, they are not evolving in a socially defined “realistic” world; we can really push further—it wouldn’t be possible in the real world to do so.”

A few months before the release of La Fille qui explose, their second feature film, Eat the Night, came out. After the Parisian première last July, I told them I really liked this film in which they seemed to reach some kind of maturity. Caroline Poggi states: “Eat the Night talks about darkness, about embracing it, being confused by it and devouring it. It’s the first of our films we wanted to be rooted in the real world. Before we were using the real world to create a virtual world.” Eat the Night recounts the death foretold by a video game, Darknoon, a young teenager lost, played by the young and talented unknown actress Lila Gueneau, and mostly depicts a beautiful love story between two young men dealing drugs. The actors Erwan Kepoa Falé and Théo Cholbi are stellar—they are both known for incursions with filmmakers like Christophe Honoré, Larry Clark or the artist Mélanie Matranga. In a sense this love story is a rare spark of light and optimism through Poggi and Vinel’s dark filmography. To conclude our interview Jonathan Vinel misquoted on purpose Werner Herzog: “You make films as if you had too many guests in one house and you are trying to have them leave. But you have to do it orderly, one by one; not altogether or it would create a monster.”