It’s a French twilight! In the cinema you can see the metaphorical and exciting film “Waiting for the Night”.

Did you like Twilight and the Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicide? You might like Waiting for Night? Winner of the Jury Prize at the recent Gérardmer Fantastic Film Festival, En followant la nuit is director Celine Rousset’s first feature film, driven by the documentary 140 Kilometers West of Paradise.

Directed by Mathias Legout Hammond, making his film debut, with Celeste Brunkel (Les Éblouis, La Fille de son père), Elodie Boucher, Jean-Charles Cliché and a young Lalie Mercier, the feature follows Philemon, a teenager who is not. Other: He needs human blood to survive. In the slightly too quiet suburb where he moves with his family, he does his best to fit in. Until the day he falls in love with his neighbor Camila and turns his attention to them…

A metaphorical and personal film

If the story definitely recalls Twilight, the film is far from the saga of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. Beyond this love story, the filmmaker wanted to highlight how conformity has taken hold in our society and how the marginalized are treated.

Celine Rousey explains in the press kit: “Waiting for the Night is the story of a boy who scares the people he loves and finds his place in a world unlike his. A film about marginality and conformity, family sacrifice, animal desire… and the savagery that lies beneath the surface of ordinary life. With this film, I wanted to express something that has always bothered me: the ordinary world that cracks, worries the characters, the discomfort caused by it.“

But this topic is also very personal. The filmmaker, originally a journalist, lost his brother in 2014 and wanted to tell his story in a feature film. He explains: “I had to tell my brother’s story, but I didn’t know how to do it in a very realistic and direct way.

One day, when I was trying out a La Fémis screenwriting workshop, the idea of ​​vampirism clearly came to me. I remembered that this figure haunted my brother so much when he was little, someone who was born different and suffered a lot from the rejection of others. As a child, she saw vampires come to her room to talk to her. He was afraid of them, but as his life progressed, he became kind of fascinated by them. He watched every vampire movie he could find, and I began to believe that he felt a connection to these elusive creatures, these fragile, dangerous monsters whose plight is seemingly invisible..”

Vampirism as a metaphor for disability

The film director and screenwriter adds:Vampirism acts as a metaphor for disability, depression and adolescent misery. For me, the use of fiction and genre cinema makes it possible to escalate situations by distancing them from too harsh a reality. The film still makes a bitter observation about the violence of the norm and the fear of others…”

you would understand that Waiting for the night is a novel laced with intimate family drama. Beyond the love story and Philemon’s need to drink blood and hide from the sun, the film is about difference and the difficulty of integrating different beings into society. Philemon’s difference affects his entire family and affects the lives of his younger sister and his parents, who will do anything to protect him.

An innocent vampire

The main difficulty in the writing of Celine Rouse and her co-writer William Martin was to make Philemon an innocent monster, a creature that the audience wants to protect. And the opening scene of the feature film achieves this brilliantly.

Celine Rousey says:Above all, I tried to evoke emotion, tension and anxiety, sometimes even laughter – rather than disgust or fear. When you think about it, neither Only lovers survivednot even At the edge of dawn Not real horror movies. I believe that the vampire was first associated with dissident and marginal communities. with my producers Candice Zacanino and Olivier Aknin, we envisioned the film as “To Old Age” hitting a wall. So I would say it’s the story of a teenager hoping to live among humans. Philemon has symptoms of a vampire and dreams of becoming a man, but society pushes him to become a vampire. Our biggest writing challenge was turning him into an innocent monster. “

Choice of actor

incarnated by Matthias Leghout Hammond, young Philemon is a teenager who dreams of being “normal,” but does normality really exist? Judged and harassed by others, the latter finds solace in Camilla’s arms.

The director explains: “Mathias stood out to me as an obvious choice, even though he had never done anything and more experienced actors were cast. I was looking for a young, strange beauty, far from the old laws of humanity. As a vampire, always an erotic figure, I was looking for a pale, sensual and terrible beauty when she appeared. , he was shaking, but he said the lines exactly as we wrote them, and it was the mix of sweetness and anger that I was looking for in Philemon.

He adds: “To build this human-vampire figure, we decorated him with David Bowie-style teeth. With make-up artist Flor Chande, we worked on her different states: sometimes more raised and feverish, veins on her forehead, sometimes more transparent paleness and hair pulled back for confidence and power…”

Enservant la nuit can be seen in cinemas from this Wednesday, June 5.