Revealed with The Velvet Queen [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Marie Amiguet e Vincent Mu…
scheda film] (unveiled as a special screening in Cannes in 2021, 2022 Best Documentary César and Lumière award winner), photographer Vincent Munier is back with Whispers in the Woods [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Vincent Munier
scheda film], which has already garnered three nominations for the upcoming Lumières awards (in the Best Documentary, Best Cinematography and Best Score categories), was released in French cinemas by Haut et Court on 17 December and which was screened in the Déplacer les montagnes section at the 17th Les Arcs Film Festival where we met the filmmaker.

Cineuropa: What was the desire behind this film, which is evidently very close to you, anchored in the Vosges woods with a family history on top of that?
Vincent Munier: I wanted to make another movie and especially with my roots: the Vosges. This is where I learned everything I know, where I live, where I still set up the hides I was doing as a kid, where I am still guided by the light, by the animals. The challenge was: how can we still touch people with this wild nature, but that nature which isn’t at the other end of the world, but very close to home, accessible, and not necessarily exceptional or iconic? Moreover, there was this parentage, this story in which I am a hyphen between two generations. Between my son and my father, I step back a little and I capture a few exchanges between them near the fireplace, in a cabin. And then, we go to sit in the hides outdoors together.

Hunting from hides means a certain rhythm of observation, waiting, silence, listening. How did you work to make the spectator enter this rhythm himself?
This was above all a long editing process. There was even an image capital there, but how to make sure that it wouldn’t be a succession of pretty images, an animal documentary? I wanted something more profound, more sensitive, more poetic, slower, realer. Because that’s reality: we don’t get everything immediately. That’s the rule of the hide: nothing is certain yet at the same time, there’s an infinite source of awe. Thanks to the ingredients of cinema, sound, nature, music, images, superb light, I had to move people, that is, I had to find the right dosage in order to bring forth this dimension of a divine encounter with the animals. Because that’s what this is about: hours, sometimes days or even years before meeting an animal. There are very strong emotions and I wanted to take the audience along into this intimacy, this tension, this atmosphere. And without forgetting nature’s sound dimension, which is very powerful.

It’s a love letter to nature that discreetly rings the ecological alarm.
Yes, it was a radiant film first of all. But we are undeniably confronted with difficult things: the extinction of species, a forest turning into more of a field of trees. All of this is subtly condemned in the film, which puts much more emphasis on beauty and feeling: we give a voice back to the wood. The best speeches about the ecological message have already been made, but we don’t hear them enough and we don’t deviate enough… This film proposes another language, that of the woods, of the trees, of feeling, vibrations, energies. My intention was to move people without necessarily using words. Because that allows one to open up, to awaken this kind of wonder that we had as kids, and which has become dormant, which society has shattered by more or less formatting us, by preventing us from taking the time, by equating success and performance, optimisation, management. And we declared war on nature, we talk about it in a rather negative way, unless we have an interest in it. And yet, to contemplate, to dream, is very important. And when we enter some woods, we enter a place where the energies and the vibrations feel good to us, like a balm, a bandage.

Music plays an essential part in your film. How did you work with Warren Ellis, Dom La Nena and Rosemary Standley?
Music is a very precious ingredient. I love to edit with “test scores” and in this case, that was a lot of cellos. When Warren, who has become a great friend, almost a big brother, saw the film, he really wanted to work on it, so he has his violins, his very strong pieces of music. As for Dom La Nena and Rosemary Standley, I wanted these feminine voices and these cellos, so we have a rather rich mix.