In the feverish summer heat, three lost souls meet on the shores of Lake Geneva. The gentle fourteen-year-old Margaux, the rebellious foster child Juliette and Joël, a fisherman who has just returned from Indonesia because of the death of his mother. The lake, nature and an idyllic fishing harbour become their hideaway, where they find each other for a brief moment. Until reality tears them apart again.

L‘AMOUR DU MONDE is my first feature film, but it follows on from my previous short films „En Août“ (2014) and „Soltar“ (2016). The same female character runs through these films and she has always the same name, Margaux. In „En Août“, it was six-and-a-half-year-old Clarisse Moussa who played Margaux. Now, seven years later, she is a young teenager in L‘AMOUR DU MONDE. Margaux is a character close to me, a kind of alter ego, inspired by the women around me, by my family history and the places I grew up.

The novel by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, „L‘amour du monde“ (1928), whose title I have adopted, was the trigger for this project, not only because it critically describes French-speaking Switzerland, but also because it speaks of the confusion between images and reality. The film also shares the setting with the novel, the shores of Lake Geneva, a sublime but self-contained area surrounded by mountains, where the protagonists vacillate between the desire to escape to a real or dreamed elsewhere and the acceptance of the here and now.

In this region the three protagonists meet, all looking for their place in the world, a family or new bonds. Margaux suffers from her father‘s absence, the breakup of first loves and unfulfilled fantasies. Juliette, who is placed in a home, and Joël, who has just lost his mother and only returned to Switzerland for the summer, also struggle with the absence of their parents.

L‘AMOUR DU MONDE is a quiet, atmospheric film that captures the summer mood and is set in the region where I grew up. Margaux, Juliette and Joël escape reality together and experience encounters with other people, nature and the landscape that surrounds them. I wanted to stay close to the characters and their faces to show how they evolve and how they change throughout the story they experience.