Documentary · 2024
Au-delà des listes is a three-part documentary about student election campaigns, filmed over eight months and built from 25 interviews. It was screened in cinemas. It is the longest and most structured project I have led to date.
A campaign documentary is filmed while the campaign is happening: on day one, nobody knows how it ends. So you film far more than you'll keep, and accept that the narrative thread only emerges in the edit.
Eight months of filming on a format like this mainly raises a continuity problem: staying present long enough that the people on camera stop performing, without becoming a participant in what you're documenting.
Twenty-five interviews amount to a volume of footage you cannot hold in your head. The real constraint isn't the filming, it's the logging: working out what each contributor brings, spotting where the accounts contradict one another, and deciding what the film is actually about.
The three-part structure came from that. A single long piece would have meant sacrificing whole angles; three episodes let each one have its own progression without crushing the others.
The film was screened in cinemas, which changes the decisions you make upstream: the pacing can be slower, the shots longer, and the sound has to hold up on a system that forgives nothing.
That's also what makes the exercise formative. An aftermovie is judged on three minutes; a documentary projected in a cinema is judged on whether it can hold a seated audience, in the dark, from beginning to end.
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