Emmanuelle Antille
Switzerland | 2023 | 96 min
World premiere
Languages : French, English
Subtitles : English, French
From her grandmother’s garden to California via the Mojave Desert and the cosmos, Emmanuelle Antille takes us on a journey to out-of-the-ordinary places, as we meet the people who created, imagined or discovered them. The Wonder Way is a free and personal quest, an inner exploration and a journey in search of unusual—but very real—spaces.
By quoting Michel Foucault at the opening of The Wonder Way, Emmanuelle Antille clearly defines the path she intends to pursue in order to explore the existence of imaginary territories. “There are countries without places, and histories without chronology; cities, planets and continents whose traces cannot be found on any map, nor in any sky. Of course, there is also the bottom of the garden....”. She then follows the philosopher’s guidance to encounter people who create unusual places: from her grandmother's garden kingdom to an orchard-jungle belonging to a collector of apple varieties, via Noah Purifoy’s bric-a-brac museum in the middle of the Californian desert and the refined cartographic works of Anne-Marie Jugnet and Alain Clairet. She listens to them talk about how they push back the limits of their living spaces, and, in turn, captures lights and shadows throughout her travels, using these images and sounds to piece together a new space for these utopias. The Wonder Way considers the creative process as a place of resistance, a tangible and very real counter-space to our present world.
Madeline Robert
