Damien Faure, Pyramiden – Festival OVNI

As sometimes happens, chance does things well. Having gone to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago lost in the Arctic, to carry out reconnaissance for a documentary on the Seed Vault, this concrete architecture that sinks into the icy rock and serves as the ultimate refuge for seeds collected from all over the world in the dire event of a climatic or nuclear catastrophe, Damien Faure accidentally heard of another astonishing place. It was thus — by chance — that he discovered not far from there a strange ghost town, named Pyramiden (Пирамида in Russian) after the shape of a mountain at the foot of which it was founded by the Swedes in 1910, then bought in 1926 by the USSR to allow a mining company to establish itself there in charge of exploiting the coal-rich subsoil, creating in fact a colony with typically Soviet architecture (down to the bust of Lenin) on Norwegian soil, left as it was after the unexpected departure of the occupants when mining ceased in 1998 — with all the traces of the past life still there: books on the shelves of the library, toys on the floor of the nursery, clothes on their hangers, even the reels of film still loaded on the projectors in the cinema room. Second coincidence: while the filming of the documentary on the botanical sanctuary was financed and ready to start, the Covid-19 crisis interrupted the project and, when the borders reopened, the people associated on site with this documentary and of which they were to be the protagonists had scattered, making it impossible to produce the work. This is when the idea of ​​moving from the Seed Vault to Pyramiden/Пирамида was born, but also from documentary to fiction. One of Damien Faure's constant questions as a filmmaker is to see how, through the framing device, we can make a character evolve in a given space. In this precise location of Pyramiden/Пирамида, the formal and suggestive power of this Soviet architectural incongruity as if fallen from the sky in the middle of the glaciers, and occasionally crossed by jaded reindeer, then offered a plastic, memorial and narrative framework conducive to pushing even further the intention of recurrent filmic experimentation in the filmmaker — the architecture almost going so far as to claim, like the hero of the film, a quality of character and a critical corporality.

Another fertile surprise, the reels found intact on site by Damien Faure in the control room of the cinema appear furtively in the editing throughout the film, staging the life of the inhabitants of the time immortalized on film by themselves, and presenting in a flickering black and white these same architectures then inhabited and a form of political and social utopia overplayed in front of the lens. The architecture in the image then plays the superposition on itself as much as in the imagination of the spectator of this strange visual and emblematic ballet.