ALPHA

Directed with Victor Carril, Alpha is a fashion film created for Studio OATH’s Spring / Summer 2016 collection, a collection drawing from several decades of counterculture, from the 1960s to the early 2000s.

The film follows Angela Sassi through a drifting urban journey between Paris and London. Moving almost unconsciously from one atmosphere to another, she crosses different fragments of time: a group of rock musicians wandering through Montmartre, a more sixties-inspired encounter with musician Fu Bandini, an underground techno party, a train journey, and the streets of London.

Inspired by the wandering characters and suspended narratives of Jim Jarmusch, Alpha unfolds as a succession of encounters rather than a conventional plot. Angela remains strangely detached from the situations around her, passing through parties, streets, bodies and landscapes as if moving between different eras of the same city.

The journey eventually leads her into a church, where the film closes with a sermon built around words by Patti Smith.

Alpha was one of the first films in which Alexandre Carril developed a situation-based approach to filmmaking that would later become central to his work. Rather than fully scripting every gesture and interaction, the directors created real situations around a loose narrative structure and allowed the performers, environments and unexpected events to evolve freely in front of the camera.

Blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, this method draws from cinema of the real and situationist practices, using lived moments as raw material for a highly constructed fictional world.