Maison Le Fay

SYNOPSIS

A portrait of an older woman isolated in her countryside home in the midst of confusion.

ABOUT CROWDFUNDING

If the funding is reached, the shooting will take place at the end of October 2012. The pre production is already in place. The postproduction will begin right after, in november, and expected to be finished by february.

The funds will be used to pay for equipment, transportation, food and lodge for the crew and talent.

ABOUT THE FILM

Estimated Duration of Film: 20 min

Fiction/Experimental

Location: Maison Le Fay, France (2.5 hours from Paris)

Maison le fay intents to explore a state of confusion, an uneasiness, a gradual shift of the mind, and the consequences that may arise from such a change.

A portrait of this woman's, where we witness her struggle.

It's about exploring the feeling of disorientation, in all senses.

CAST

Catherine Jauniaux

Catherine is a Belgian avant-garde singer. She has been described as a “one-woman -orchestra”, a “human sampler”.

She began her career as an actress in Belgium at the age of 16.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, she sang with several experimental rock groups, including Aksak Maboul and The Work. In the early 1990s, Jauniaux moved to New York City where she became part of the Downtown music scene, performing with a number of musicians, including Fred Frith, Tom Cora, Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori.

Catherine Jauniaux works regularly with artists in the field of dance and film, she also sang in Heiner Goebbels’s opera, Roemische Hunde in Frankfurt in 1991. Her performances mix seriousness and humour , explores sound, emotion, melody and abstraction.

Her vocal improvisations range from “traditional French chansons to breathy folk to Dadaistic glossolalia”

MUSIC COMPOSER

Gaspar Claus

Gaspar was destined for a highly successful career as a cellist. But as he reached his teenage years he decided to leave the Perpignan Conservatoire, rejecting a rather academic form of training in order to reach beyond the “non-confrontational” beauty of his instrument and expand the range of its uses. “My interest in cello lies in the textures and raw sounds it produces”, says Gaspar. So he immersed himself in a radical, unconventional new curriculum, one based on travelling, meeting people and discovery.

He learned to use silence in music: maintaining it and disrupting it. His relationship with his instrument began almost to smoulder as he stroked, thumped or caressed it. He became involved with a wide variety of musical scenes, such as the avant-garde and improvised scenes in Japan (Sashiko M, Yoshihide Otomo, Keiji Haino, etc.), France (Catherine Jauniaux, Benat Achiary, Nosfell, etc.) and New York (Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, etc.) but also in electronic music (Joakim, Rone), traditional music (Mongolia, Mali, Japan…) and a host of other genres. “the great expanse that symbolises possibility has never narrowed before my eyes and my only certainty is that I do not know where I am headed”, he adds. After several months spent thinking about the best place and approach, the duo eventually set off for New York – Brooklyn to be precise – to hand over production duties on “Barlande” to a friend of the family, Bryce Dessner (guitarist for The National and creator of Clogs). Although the duo brought along early demos for some of the tracks, the studio sessions gave pride of place to improvisation, which were in some cases held with very special guests. Joined by Bryce Dessner on guitar and Sufjan Stevens on harmonium, one of the improvisation sessions proved to be the ideal closing track for the album: the terribly Jarmushian “Encuentro en Brooklyn”.

Gaspar Claus video fragments by Vincent Moon.

Video edit by Arturo Manrique