AMOUR AMOUR

FILM

Inspired by Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin, Amour Amour reimagines the fairy tale through a contemporary group of characters lost in the wild landscapes of the Cévennes.

In the 1970 film, Catherine Deneuve escapes into the forest and begins a new life surrounded by strange objects, anachronisms and moments of surreal humour. Amour Amour takes this idea as a starting point and transposes it into the present.

A group of young people takes over a river, a waterfall and the surrounding rocks, transforming the landscape into an improvised place to live. A television and game consoles appear at the water’s edge. A vanity table becomes a dressing room beneath the trees. Laundry is hung across the rocks, while an impromptu photo studio emerges in the middle of the landscape.

Through these playful and slightly fantastical scenes, the film imagines a new generation of fairy-tale characters — contemporary heroines, poetic figures and powerful faces inventing their own world somewhere between reality, childhood play and fiction.

PROCESS

The film was created alongside the photographic campaign by Studio L’Étiquette, Manon Engels and Alma de Ricou, during a small-scale shoot in the Cévennes.

Shot mainly with a handheld camera, and at times with a phone, the film was made in natural locations with almost no additional lighting. This deliberately lightweight production process allowed us to preserve a sense of freedom and spontaneity throughout the shoot.

The story of Amour Amour emerged progressively from the landscape, the flow of the river and a series of largely improvised situations. Dialogues, gestures and staging evolved on location, allowing a shared imaginary world to appear — a kind of distorted mirror of reality, and a contemporary fairy tale shaped by the world around us.