Projects
Wild Encounters
A policeman investigates an illicit wild boar trade without realising he is actually investigating himself.
In a remote corner of north-eastern France, hunters and farmers are at war over wild boar overpopulation and crop destruction. Brun, a 50-year-old farmer, struggles to keep his farm afloat. But Brun is also the last in a long line of hunters whose “black blood” burns in their veins like an addiction to hunting. When a local nobleman pushes him to the limit, Brun shoots him with his father’s rifle and disappears into the forest. A year later, Brun is still on the run, and Fulda, a depressed cop transferred from Corsica to this godforsaken hole for disciplinary measures, is forced to investigate. But the wild boars proliferating in the region begin to invade his psyche, echoing strangely with his mistrust of women and his inability to comply with the rules. Things go from bad to worse when the psychologist assigned to Fulda turns out to be female, as well as attracted to him. When he finally crosses paths with Brun, Fulda goes off the rails, fleeing into the wild himself.
Wild Encounters is at the same time a detective film, a black comedy, an initiation quest, a social drama and a love story. With this film, I would like to talk about impulses we do not understand – emotions and instincts that cannot be contained. Wild boars are troublesome, ugly, ridiculous and majestic. I recognise in them a symbol of our own inner brutality and rebellious nature. Their pervasive presence can be read as a metaphor for the intrusion of the wild into our domesticated world. Through them, I can question the role of what is considered savage in contemporary society, the borders we create to delimit this society and our desire to break these boundaries – what hides behind what we call “human”. A hunter comes face-to-face with this savage nature when he kills an animal, killing what he admires most: the animal with which he identifies and his own wildness. Hunting also allows me to study man’s relationship to predation and, consequently, his relationship to others, to sex and to love.
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