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Original Film Title: Summertime à Esparon
Director’s Name: Martine Fougeron
Writer’s Name: Martine Fougeron
Producer: Martine Fougeron
Country of Origin: France
Country of Filming: France
Language: French
Runtime: 32 minutes 22 seconds
Film Description:
At the end of the 1950s, a French expat family in New York, spend their summers on the Mediterranean beaches, then, tired of the crowds of vacationers, choose a much more remote and ancestral place. Esparon, a small Cévennes hamlet abandoned since the second World War, is perched on a rock. It becomes for this family, sensitive to beauty and art, a real refuge whose restoration will take several years.
Within this colony, there are Georges Tonnellier and Pierre Fougeron, grandfather and father of the artist photographer Martine Fougeron. Both men practice photography and 16 mm film intensely. Equipped with a Leica and a Beaulieu R16 camera, they capture on the spot, with an incredible sense of the frame, the solar moments of the life of the beings who are dear to them. Esparon becomes for this family a kind of sanctuary, and through this love of photography the two men transmit their common sensibility and sensuality to Martine who in turn seizes the photographic art and will develop over several decades a setting in images which explores the landscape of adolescence of her two sons, Nicolas and Adrien.
The musical theme “Summertime” by the Gershwin brothers along with Martine’s narrative voice crosses this long family history and gives the film an epic dimension, through four generations — seventy years of an intimate genealogy.