Through her window, Sophie Roger films her neighbours tending a community vegetable garden as seasons pass by. At the same time, she reads passages from Tristes tropiques and regularly abandons her observation post to enter the frame, meet her neighbours, ask them to pose for filmed portraits. “I hate voyages and explorers”, as Claude Lévi-Strauss warns the readers of his Tristes tropiques. A warning that caused quite a stir given that his book looked back on his stay in Brazil and developed a reflection on his first anthropological experience among the Bororos, Nambikwaras and Tupi-Kawahibs. And, importantly, it was written in 1954–1955, fifteen years after his return. A matter of distance. How can we read this text today? What does it mean to read in the present? Thanks to Sophie Roger, we are safe and sound. For her first film, no distant expedition. Her anthropological gesture combines the inside and outside, what is said and what is seen. Where? In France, in a place known as “Little Paris”, a community garden is observed from a window. Outside: as seasons change, gardeners of all ages come and go, wait, pace up and down their furrows, bustle about and also have fun. Inside: a whispering voice reveals the book, chapter by chapter, in the confines of the invisible house, where we hear only discreet noises, the creak of footsteps in a stairway, the rustle of pages being turned, muffled snippets of music. The words from far away and yesterday resonate with the images of here and now. Far from the tropics, a gaze filled with wonder is being constructed. One that involves each of us cultivating our attention like a fragile plant, far from the monoculture foretold by the worried anthropologist. (Nicolas Feodoroff — FID)

Hidden behind the name of the most famous of flowers there lies a homage. To what? To the colour red, to flushing women. To women enraged by justice like Rosa Luxembourg; to women engaged in the austere precision of an art of truth like Danièle Huillet. Because — it is quite clear and the dates in the subtitles in the credits confirm it (1916/1936/2006) — the voices of one or the other cross the “botanical symphony” that reveals the images in sequence. It is the latter’s concern for precision that is heard in the diction of the letters written in 1916 by the former. While Rosa Luxembourg is known for having been the heroic organiser Spartacist, who was assassinated by the police in 1919, it is another timbre than that of combat- ive militant that resonates here. “Do you remember what we were planning to do when the war is over?” she writes to one of her correspondents. Such is the subject matter of these letters: the certain memory of the future. The hauntingly insistent reminder of the causes for which the struggle must be led. If a revolution is to be undertaken, and with all the necessary devotion, it is, to exclude oneself from a project bound to the rational. To what end then? To rediscover the gracious and inconsequential innocence of the original garden. To become animal or plant again, nature without fatality. Return, all in all and according to a familiar messianism, to Master Eckhart’s famous mystical programme “the rose does not have a why”. In this first long film, Anne-Marie Faux celebrates the passion of unhindered floral existence without yielding anything to the demands that such an ambition requires. (Jean-Pierre Rehm — FID)