11/06/2014 - In her second film, Un homme à la mer, Géraldine Doignon tells the story of an unconventional friendship between a mother-in law and a son-in-law

Un homme à la mer (© Hélicotronc/Valérie Houdart)

Géraldine Doignon kicked off filming for her second feature length film, Un homme à la mer [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], this month. After De leur vivant, an intimate drama on grief and the necessity to embrace life in order to accept loss, the director has turned towards another type of absence. Mathieu, a marine biologist frustrated by his rat lab life and a relationship going nowhere, dreams of living by the sea. When he learns that his mother-in-law has escaped, something shifts in him and he decides to go looking for her. It is the sign he had been waiting for. He finds her in a house by the sea and decides to start his life again, reconnecting with the man he always dreamed of being. Un homme à la mer is an initiation journey and the story of an unconventional friendship tying a 30-year-old to his mother-in-law, whose spontaneous freedom he admires.  

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The director chose actors she had already worked with for her main characters. For the role of Mathieu, Géraldine Doignon once more turned to Yoann Blanc, a stage actor who has also appeared in a dozen films and who had already played in De leur vivant. Christine is played by Jo Deseure, who had already appeared in the director’s short Le Syndrôme du Cornichon. Also starring is Christian Crahay, who played the father in De leur vivant. Some newcomers to Géraldine Doignon’s world include Bérengère Bodin and Jospéhine Stoll. 

The film is produced by Hélicotronc (which recently finished L’Année Prochaine, first feature film by Vania Leturcq), in coproduction with Fontana and Kizmar Films, and with support from the CCA of the Wallonia-Brussels federation, the CNC, the RTBF and the Poitou-Charentes region.

(Translated from French)