Elio Balézeaux talks about his photographic work on Louise Courvoisier’s "Vingt Dieux"

Vingt Dieux is Louise Courvoisier’s first feature film, but also my first fiction feature. We both attended the CinéFabrique and were long-time friends, our artistic complicity confirmed with a medium-length documentary, Roule ma poule, shot together just before the Covid.
Vingt Dieux (Twenty Gods) follows Totone, her sister and her buddies, a small band of young people from a working-class, rural environment in the Jura region, in an initiatory tale of village parties, mourning, the discovery of sexuality, and county making.
She wanted the film to be firmly rooted in the region where she has always lived, and the casting was 100% non-professional, with young (and not-so-young) people cast locally, in the Jura, Ain and Doubs regions.
Having both grown up in the countryside, we wanted to take a position that was as political as it was aesthetic : we wanted to portray rural youth with a gentle, tender and above all non-overbearing eye, while also amplifying their beauty and that of their region. We wanted to bring a romantic dimension to this story and to these young people.
We immediately sought to strike a balance between a realistic image, anchored in a social body (notably through the choice of sets and costumes) and a more committed, stylized image. Louise’s references were mostly North and South American films, many of them westerns, where the way of filming rural life is quite different, not hesitating to sublimate it, to move away from a naturalistic rigor.

Louise knew she wanted to shoot in anamorphic, for the physical relationship it brings between body and space, and for its capacity to bring something grandiose, very cinematic, even sexy, as Louise would say.
For our previous documentary, we shot with an old Lomo Foton 37-140mm zoom lens, which we loved for its warm skins, incomparable softness and ability to be re-contrasted very strongly in color grading without becoming hard on the textures.
We tried out several anamorphic series with this in mind, and settled on a very short Lomo Round Front series consisting of a 50 and a 75mm only.
We also found that this series gave the characters just the right amount of distance, just the right amount of romance, and some really over-the-top flair, which we decided to play with. I used these lenses between 4 and 5.6 during the day, as the depth of field seemed just right, and the overall feeling less "vintage" while retaining a very organic feel. At night I shot at 2.8, where they were sometimes almost too droopy.

The rigor brought by this limited palette of two focal lengths appealed to us, even if we took the Foton zoom with us as a Swiss Army knife, as well as a doubler for the 50, as the too-short focal length didn’t suit the film well.
I also filtered these lenses with White Pro-Mist to record a very soft image. Right from the film tests, color-grader Gadiel Bendelac and I sought to achieve a dynamic, contrasty, saturated image, with warm skins, while retaining the flaws, roundness and velvety quality of these lenses. We also wanted to take on the grain of the Alexa at ISO 2,000, which we found very organic. There was this contradiction that interested us : finding a modernity by assuming very old optics and a strong grain without making a vintage image, without trying to emulate a film rendering. We sometimes struggled to maintain a balance between a clean, colorful image and the skin, often reddened by the sun, as well as the Alexa’s sometimes rather garish greens...

On the other hand, the way we conceived our cut was much more empirical than theoretical.
I was lucky enough to be present at many rehearsals, where we were able to find what we felt was most important : time and distance for the actors. Indeed, even if the film is not the most talkative, it is very written, and we had to find with each of these young non-actors how to position ourselves to be in the right place for their fragility, their explosiveness, in which scenes we could stay relatively at a distance, in long shots, in which scenes we had to impulse movement, let them evolve, highlight their physicality. We didn’t want to be dogmatic with the coverage, so we worked with them to find several ways of doing things that would become recurrent in the film : long, two-person shots, oners, in which we would still plan editing points, either by connecting on-axis, or using panoramic to follow one or other of the protagonists, and we would change according to the shots ; sequences that were much more chopped up, organized around Totone’s point of view, in "pivot", also very often with pan ; sequences that were more hybrid between fiction and documentary, where the camera, this time on the shoulder, adapted to the urgency of a situation shot in real-life conditions, a calving, the live production of a Comté cheese... which brought tension, concentration and the right gestures.
We found that the film was well written in static shots and long panoramics, contrasted with real energetic movement driven by the many engines, motorcycles, tractors, stock cars, for which we allowed ourselves freedom in the devices, hooks, quad-traveling... We liked to play on these contrasts between long, posed shots and more frenetic sequences.
But what really made all these set-ups coherent (and what’s more, they were shot on many different sets and all out of order) was the rigor with which I tried to find the right distance from the characters, which I try to apply when shooting documentaries, a balance between strong presence in the frame and modesty.

We did a lot of location scouting with Louise and her sister, Ella Courvoisier, the set designer, to find the film’s (very) many sets, and to fine-tune the balance between a traditional, rural Jura with a modern edge (alternating dry-stone houses with rendered, stainless steel factories,1960s tractors with flashier motocross bikes...).
This scouting also formed the basis for the lighting work, which had to be based on raw light : hard sunlight, neon and industrial LEDs on farms and fruit orchards, motorcycle headlights, and the question of how to move and magnify them.

To achieve this, we made extensive use of the natural light on site, supported by LED sources (Hydra Panels, Astera, etc.) and sometimes M18s from outside. We always tried to find the right balance between raw and aesthetic light, often using strong contrasts, as well as the colors of these sources : very red-orange sodiums, warm-green industrial tubes, bluish xenon headlights...
In the same way, we wanted to play with a strong, scorching sun, like the summer when we shot, often close to burning out, with very hot days contrasting with very dense nights, where we willingly accepted underexposure, to rediscover the sensation of country nights where the only sources are in, motorcycle headlights and their reflections, automatic farmhouse LEDs, cell phone flash, and the rest is plunged into darkness.

The nights were originally intended to take up a large part of the film, with the milk collections taking place at night or in the early hours of the morning, but as two of the actors were minors, we had to move many of them into the daytime, and managed to organize several times of shooting in the middle of the night... which in the end were rather unsuccessful, in my opinion : as one of the main sets was in a basin, there was very little benefit to be had from the colors and soft contrast of these hours between day and night : the sun fell earlier and only the sky remained as a source, bathing the area in a rather flat blue-gray... it was infuriating when the rest of the countryside was enjoying the lights of twilight at this time of year and the mists so characteristic of the Jura, which Louise held dear.

The shoot was far from easy, with plenty of twists and turns, For example, we had to stop for six weeks after only five days of shooting, because an actor broke his leg... A large part of the work schedule had to be reorganized, especially as it was very constrained by a calving sequence, a key scene in the narrative with a lot of acting, during which the aforementioned cow gave birth in 7 minutes, leaving us only one take, completely documentary, to shoot the sequence... Likewise, the scorching conditions of August 2023 sometimes put us to the test, but Louise’s local and family roots, and her energy in bringing people together, made for a really cohesive shoot, with the crew coming from all over France, Louise’s family, the actors and all those from the Jura who took part in this adventure, it was truly beautiful.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank my entire team, who supported me in this first feature-length film and gave me a great deal of serenity and balance, even at the most intense moments.

Totone, 18, spends most of his time drinking beers and scouring the Jura dances with his gang of buddies. But reality catches up with him : he has to look after his 7-year-old sister and find a way to earn a living. So he sets out to make the best Comté cheese in the region, one that will win him the gold medal at the Concours Agricole and 30,000 euros.