La Pierre de sel-Panorama 14

Don’t try and understand times gone by, because it won’t work. Force yourself to understand the times you are living in, as that iswhere you’ll spend your life and you still won’t understand it. (Extract of an interview with a Romanian architect from the communist era).
It is 1959 in Bucharest. The film shoot is taking place in Le Fresnoy studio, with actors from Romania. The studio becomes a space ship and sends them back to the beginning of the Romanian communist era with absolutely none of the iconography specific to the images of remaining archives. The idea is to relive the communist experience without the historical a priori. To find oneself confronted with situations that have not yet acquired their meaning, to experience them literally in their project phase.
The three characters in the film are architects, but do not fulfil the legal requirements for the right to housing and thus to personal affairs. A paradoxical situation which condemns those who project new working class housing to live in nothing else but their own discourse on architecture.
The inside spaces are entirely white, totally undefined, no dimensions or partitions: they do not constitute «a roof». The outside spaces are projections of digital images on a screen. So the outside remains inaccessible. In deliberate fashion, I chose not to use conventional incrusted images by  filming characters on a green screen and adding 3D images during the post-production; I would like the co-existence of the characters and the 3D to be a common present in the film studio and not a later invention in the post-production sequence. The set is not symbolic but it is the real space where these people live, eat, drink and are overcome by sleep in restaurants, parks, cinemas, in the tramways at night, in the street.
_ E.M.