Baleines (Sylvain Dufayard, Belgium, 2025, 8:23)

Baleines

(Sylvain Dufayard, Belgium, 2025, 8:23)

Credits
Director: Sylvain Dufayard
Writers: Nicole Mossoux, Patrick Bonté
Producer: Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté
Music: Thomas Turine
Choreography and concept: Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté

Project details
Project Type: Experimental short / Videodance
Runtime: 8 minutes 23 seconds
Completion Date: March 28, 2025
Production Budget: 25,000 EUR
Country of Origin and Filming: Belgium
Shooting Format: HD
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Color film

Description

A camera moves between the bodies of four women who maintain a strange verticality despite their immersion in the ocean. Like sleeping whales, they drift gently, without fear or restraint, their faces clinging to the surface of the water. The piece evokes both serenity and tension, an ambiguous balance between calm and suffocation.

The project explores two main themes: the representation of women and climate change. It draws inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelite fascination with female figures such as Millais’ Ophelia, reinterpreting the image of the passive woman in distress. Here, the water is both refuge and threat, an environment of suspension that may precede or follow a catastrophe. Filmed in a region of Belgium affected by floods in 2021, Baleines blurs the line between human memory and natural trauma.

Director and Authors

Sylvain Dufayard is a documentary and experimental filmmaker based in Brussels. He began directing music videos under the pseudonym Les Hauts Perchés, several of which received the CNC quality award. He has collaborated with Bérangère McNeese, Jérôme Guiot, and Jonathan Rochart, and co-directed the feature documentary Uyanga, le long de la rivière fanée. His films often explore the limits of realism and poetic imagery, as seen in Sous ta peau, la cavale and Vague du Midi.

Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté founded the Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté in 1985. Their work merges dance and theatre into a hybrid language that invites the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Their pieces often explore the unconscious, ambiguity, and the strange beauty of human behavior, bridging visual art, psychoanalysis, and performance.

Music was composed by Thomas Turine, a frequent collaborator of Mossoux-Bonté, known for his cinematic and atmospheric approach to sound for the performing arts.

Programmer’s notes – Blas Payri

Baleines stands out as a rare example of underwater videodance that succeeds aesthetically and conceptually. Underwater filming often results in technical or visual compromises, but here it achieves a poetic precision that feels natural and deliberate. The dancers maintain an eerie stillness, suspended between immersion and verticality, while the surface of the water becomes a luminous ceiling reflecting the light.

The piece embraces the nature of the aquatic medium rather than fighting against it. The choreography is slow, almost imperceptible, allowing the weight of the water to dictate the rhythm. The lighting is masterfully designed, with beams that trace the contours of the bodies and give them sculptural depth. Shadows and reflections merge into an atmospheric, hypnotic visual field where the distinction between movement and stasis dissolves.

The dancers are dressed in formal office clothing — blouses, straight skirts, and high heels — as if they had been interrupted in their daily routine underwater. This choice introduces a striking tension between the ordinary and the surreal, between the rigidity of social roles and the fluidity of their new environment.

The work also has something of videoperformance. The bodies are not in active motion but often frozen in suspended gestures, creating a state of contemplation rather than dance. These moments of stillness, together with the symbolic setting, transform the image of the dancers into that of performers in an extended act of endurance and immersion.

The editing is composed mainly of dissolves and slow camera drifts, reinforcing the sensation of a continuous, floating time. The sound design, built on long violin tones that recall whale calls, deepens this sense of suspension. The overall result is a slow, immersive drift through an aqueous dream, where image, sound, and movement fuse into a single, weightless choreography.