7 Walks with Mark Brown (Dir. Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré, 2024, 103 min)
Filmmaker and farmer Pierre Creton returns to the Normandy landscape so lushly portrayed in 2023's A Prince. Now, in this singularly tranquil documentary, co-directed with filmmaker-sculptor Vincent Barré, he offers an experience pleasing in its magnificent simplicity. Accompanied by a small filming crew, Creton and Barré follow paleobotanist Mark Brown across seven locations in the Pays des Caux region as he seeks out native plants from which an ancient garden could be created and explains, with the loving tenderness of a true expert, the etymology, beauty, and scientific properties of the region’s flora. Structured in two halves, 7 Walks with Mark Brown first documents the making of these expeditions and then presents the result, a cinematic work of taxonomy and poetry, of nature and camaraderie. (NYFF)
Followed by:
Va, Toto! (Dir. Pierre Creton, 2017, 94 min)
The appearance of a wild boar in the life of Madeleine, an elegant and solitary septuagenarian, disrupts the lives of several neighbors in a hamlet in the Normandy region of Caux, including the faithful filmmaker Pierre Creton. From this singular situation, the artist builds an unruly ark, as resistant to the demands of an inflexible world as it is open to the boundaries of dreams, stories, and free association. A profoundly original and audacious work, Va, Toto! then composes a new material, mixing reality with a rare romantic and meaningful power. Insular, the beautiful cinema of Pierre Creton still plows a tiny territory to erect it into an inexhaustible mythology of desire. (tënk)
TRT: 197 min
"Fiercely independent... [7 Walks with Mark Brown] is a great film. Pure light." —Alfonso Rivera, Cineuropa
“Pierre Creton’s cinema springs from this solidarity between life and art, sealed by necessity.” —Cahiers du Cinéma
"Getting caught up in Brown’s love of plants is one of 7 Walks’ great pleasures, and a key to its success." —Chris Cassingham, InReviewOnline
“[7 Walks with Mark Brown] shows us an exquisite microcosm of existence, containing rich history, meaning, and mystery.” –Isaac Feldberg, RogerEbert.com
"[7 Walk with Mark Brown has] the incomparable charm of a home movie... Creton and Barré do not create a fantasy of an unchanging, sublime wilderness, but instead attempt to picture how nature relates to us: how we are a part of it and how we are, also, separate from it." —Pierre Jendrysiak, Screen Slate
(Available to download after screening date)