Autostop

Roman Hüben
Switzerland | 2025 | 60 min
World premiere
Language : French
Subtitles : English

For years, Floriane has been recording her conversations with the drivers who picked her up as a hitchhiker. She now re-enacts these scenarios with two actors, who perform the exchanges word for word with the help of an earpiece. Together, they explore the possibilities of interpretation, and the relationship between fiction and documentary.

Floriane Mésenge is a curious creature—part theatre artist, part wandering soul—who once roamed the backroads of her native Normandy with her thumb outstretched, hitching rides through the countryside. Later, working as an actress in Lausanne, she got back on the road, this time armed with a recorder to capture the fleeting, intimate conversations that unfold between strangers within the cocoon of a car. These encounters would become the raw material for a documentary play co-performed with Maxime Gorbatchevsky and Jean-Daniel Piguet. Now reuniting on screen under the direction of Roman Hüben, the trio dons earpieces and re-enacts these original encounters, word for word, scene for scene. As Floriane the hitchhiker journeys onward, she meets a misogynistic psychologist, a truck driver recounting his romances with two women who later discovered they were lesbians, a gloomy pervert, and a pair of ageing, conspiracy-loving hippies… In this fictionalised road movie—titled Autostop, like the stage production which inspired it—the performers guide us through a series of comic, unsettling, and deeply human micro-dramas. A stylised miniature stage becomes the site of fleeting yet vivid connections, where the theatre of everyday life unfolds, one ride at a time.

Emmanuel Chicon

Autostop, 2025
Douglas Sirk – Hope as in Despair, 2022
Villa Ventura, 2017
Santa Cristina, 2017
Sie in ihm, 2016
Io ho un potere, 2013