The Fleeting Shadow of Things

Jacques Giraldeau's The Fleeting Shadow of Things invites us on a journey, a variation on carefully crafted memories tracing a remarkable bridge between "once" and "from now on." It is a delicate work of filmic art, unfolding in a mosaic of keepsakes and images gathered in the course of a lifetime. In it, we follow the enigmatic Évariste Quesnel from Cuba to Île-aux-Grues, but he eludes us, leaving only the footprint of where he has been - an invitation to meditate on and learn to read those places. Criss-crossing these fragments of yesterday and today, now abandoned to memory - diary, film, painting, letter, questioning our relationship with these shadows, the filmmaker posits art as the archives of real life, a place where the crumbling of time is, somehow, stopped.