June Balthazard
Le baiser du silure - Film - 15min - 2018
présenté dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 20
The figure of a fisherman at dusk. What is it that drives this body to brave the dark, the solitude, the cold, with time suspended like the mist? — What this fisherman is after is a silurid, a deep-water catfish that has the unusual feature of being able to grow larger than a human being. Since it began colonising French rivers a few decades ago, this species – originally from the Danube – has aroused media interest and provoked questioning and anxiety. Our knowledge of silurids is limited and the species inspires the same wariness as any foreign body suspected of upsetting the established order of things.
Three documentary voice-overs accompany the fisherman’s excursion: his own, and those of a scientist and a poetess. They open a door to the mysterious depths and to the irrational, while reflecting on the natural order and the relation between Man and his environment.
Suddenly, some odd phenomena begin to occur, giving the impression that our perception is distorted, hallucinatory, that phantasmagorical events are suddenly taking place. The terms “strange” and “stranger” recover their primitive meaning.
June Balthazard
Born in France in 1991, June Balthazard studied simultaneously at the Institut supérieur des beaux-arts (isba) in Besançon and at the Haute École d’art et de design (head) in Geneva (department of Cinema/Cinema of the Real).
She has made several short films which are grounded in the real and at the same time break free of it. Her work has been shown in exhibitions such as “Les liaisons équivoques” at the Musée des beaux-arts in Dole, at the “Special Sessions” of the frac Franche-Comté as well as at festivals, notably Visions du réel in Nyon, where she won the Opening Scene prize in 2018.
