In 1988, Perestroika is moving across the Soviet Union.
A modern art museum in Paris hears about a lost tribe that has been discovered deep in the Siberian forest. They hire a famous - but somewhat passé - film director named Walerian to head up a river expedition into Siberia with famous works of French modern art on board. Walerian’s mission is to make a film about the journey and to capture the reactions of people who have never seen modern art before. But Walerian is not remotely interested in French modern art, or in Siberian tribes. He is set on making his greatest and possibly last work. He seizes this opportunity where, once in Siberia, he is sure to have full reign over the production. The expedition sets sail on a windy upriver journey through an increasingly hostile forest. On board, his son Dante, who assists Walerian, and the motley crew is preyed upon by an array of insects and diseases. The journey is treacherous and frought with mishaps, but Walerian continues to drag onward, right to the bitter end. It’s not until his son is blinded that he finally decides to abandon the mission. Part of the crew has left, the Picabia painting stolen by Russian military, the Tinguely used to fix the motor, while the Klein painting has been half-eaten by insects. Walerian goes into the forest to film the Klein’s slow deterioration
frame-by-frame. When the film is projected, human figures can be made out in the background huddling around the painting with great curiosity. It seems the museum has unwittingly found the lost tribe it was looking for.

The Pompidou Centre in Paris asked me one day to think about a film to celebrate their 30th anniversary. Nothing happened with my Pompidou commission, but that is where the idea started for The Man Who Hides the Forest. At first, the works that I chose for the film were associated with particular concepts in art, or with Parisian snobbery. Duchamp’s urinal is an archetypal example of French modern art (it has been the main feature of subway posters advertising the Centre). But my primary delight was to immerse works of modern art into the heart of a wild forest, and watch them gradually return to their original form, to organic matter. It is a harsh reality that Klein paintings experience even in museums, where they are continuously disintegrating. When they are exhibited, deposits of blue pigments pile up on the ground, much to the embarrassment of curators. Whereas a Tinguely sculpture can suddenly become useful in the middle of a remote river if, for example, a motor breaks down. The disintegration of modern art takes place against the backdrop of an adventure film, thus reviving the spirit of performance cinema. In the 70s Herzog, Coppola, and several others, gave their film crews the opportunity to live extraordinary human adventures, that merged with the plots of the films. The main character Walerian is inspired by the right-to-the-bitter-end nature of these director/performers from the 70s. He almost acts like a missionary, brandishing a camera instead of a cross. He gives life back to dead creatures by means of stop-motion animation, he acts like a demigod resuscitating the dead, and then plays his illusionist’s trick and screens the results in front of dumbfounded spectators. Walerian drags his crew into the deepest reaches of Siberia for an adventure that plays out in a setting that has rarely been seen on film, in one of the vastest and wildest places on the planet. The story unfolds at the time of Perestroika, a period of chaos when borders were opened and haughty Europe sweet talked Russia and condescendingly treated it like an underdeveloped country. The time and the place seem particularly well-suited for this artistic and aquatic adventure.