Creators: Marc Lahore & Julieta Salz, Producer: Jokin Etcheverria, Production: La Fidèle Production, Co-production: Media Attack, Country: France/Spain, Language: French, 3 x 25’/75′, 2021, Rights: World
France, early 2020. As the whole country is under one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns, a young woman, living on her own, has to face herself – quite literally – as she discovers, day after day, pictures of herself, via a series of videos. Which she never shot in the first place.
Is her forced solitude driving her crazy? Or has she fallen prey to some unknown, outer force?
Shot in extraordinary conditions, JOKARI is a technical and artistic feat that tells us about the conflicts and intimate questions each of us has had to face as a result of our quarantine. It is not a movie about the pandemic, but a movie shot during the lockdown.
During the confinement of lockdown artist couple Julieta Salz a circus artist, and Marc Lahore, a film director – decide to write, direct, dance and perform Jokari, a virtuoso exercise in style… as well as an intimist sci-fi fable.
Creators Note
Jokari attempts to illustrate, through a transparent metaphor, the intimate questions and conflicts each and every one of us had to face, due to the lockdown – due to lockdowns everywhere, as it happens. The search for meaning in the middle of chaos; the hardships of living daily confined with oneself; of getting to think about whom one really is… who he or she could be, or become – arguably someone better.
Thus Jokari proves a modern quest for identity, as well as a parable on solitude; a film whose very history and nature bleed onto its storyline… A film that questions, and expands, the very textures of space and time, whose lonely characters prove just as much avatars of its two filmmakers as fictional doubles of all the confined souls of the entire world.
Directors Bio
Marc Lahore an activist and jack-of-all-trades who grew up between a mountain of VHS and a heap of comic books, Marc took an early interest in the plastic arts. A volunteer projectionist and then an audiovisual editor, he pursued a career as an Anglican – specialising in Elizabethan literature – in parallel with his technical tinkering. The director deals with often puzzling formal biases, between 2005 and 2014 he produced a homeless thriller, a historical mini-series, a boxing film, a series of (very) experimental shorts as well as a potent and subversive horror comedy. The Open, which travelled to festivals around the world between 2016 and 2017, is his first feature film. Upon receiving a grant from CNC Marc wrote science fiction series, Mémoria, alongside Laurent Genefort and develops a series with French comics author Jean-David Morvan.