Stéphane Breton (filmmaker)

He shot in a train, in the middle of Russia, A Few Days Together (Quelques jours ensemble, 90 min, 2013): sixty thousand kilometres in the overheated third-class wagon of a train crossing the winter at the speed of a galloping donkey, in the company of an ex-serviceman of the Red Army with whom the filmmaker has been travelling for some time. The most unexpected characters get on and off, eat a bit, chat, lose themselves in their thoughts, snort, and most of all tell the story of their broken lives.

He is editing The Departed (20 min, 2013), a video installation about people sleeping in a Russian train.

He is currently preparing the shooting of Before Me, Dark Forests (Devant moi, les forêts sombres, 52 min, 2013), a film about a small Tatarian people in the Altay Mountains, in Russia.

He shot Ascent to the Sky (La montée au ciel, 52 min, 2009): in a small valley in Nepal, at the end of a path worn out by so many feet and so many centuries, two old shepherds escape from their village to climb the mountains: shit everywhere, purity of heart, bedazzlement.

He directed The Empty House (La maison vide, 52 min, 2008). Shot like a western without a gun, at a drunkard's distance, the film takes place in New Mexico among an ancient Spanish community eaten to rack and ruin by rust, beer, and dust storms.

He shot The Outside World (Le monde extérieur, 54 min, 2007) in the streets of Paris. This cinematic essay is a dreamlike straddling of worlds as well as a poetical and nonsensical, lilliputian ethnography. In a way, it is Them and Me in reverse: the filmmaker now turns his camera on the people who live in his "village", whom he observes through the candid eye of a fictitious, foreign friend, who is unaware of crowds and cities, and to whom he talks about the most insignificant things.

With Night Rising on Clouds (Nuages apportant la nuit, 30 min, 2007), he develops an experimental narrative using still, black-and-white pictures. It is the mysterious and eerie tale of a journey through an unknown, dark forest, with a musical score composed by Karol Beffa.

He directed A Silent Summer (Un été silencieux, 52 min, 2005), a film that takes place on the summer pastures of Kyrgyzstan, in the Tian Shan Mountains, not far from China. Through the attention it pays to ordinary moments, the film describes the solitude and arguments of shepherds living in the same tent, as well as that of the filmmaker, present but unnoticed, remote from their gazes.

In 2005, Breton received the prize for "best documentary of the year" awarded by the French Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia for Heaven in a Garden (Le ciel dans un jardin).

His second film in New Guinea, Heaven in a Garden (Le ciel dans un jardin, 62 min, 2003), follows the last journey, reflective and nostalgic, of the ethnographer. One's gaze is attracted to the poetry of small things. It is a film about the stream of time and remembrance.

There, he filmed Them and Me (Eux et moi, 63 min, 2001). Shot behind the scenes, from the point of view of a subjective camera, the film shows his ambiguous relations and negotiations with the people of this small village lost in the mountains.

Stéphane Breton (born 1959) is a French filmmaker, photographer and anthropologist.

This six-film series is a record of local humanity at the dawning of the 21st century, in the same way as Albert Kahn had undertaken at the beginning of last century with Archives of the Planet (Les archives de la planète) by sending photographers and filmmakers around the world.