Un pays en flammes

If you’ve felt the magic of fireworks in person, you know that looking at photos and videos of them is never quite the same. In her debut feature, Mona Convert ambitiously refutes this idea to create A FIRELAND. This expansive, rhythmically driven experimental film connects the wizardry of master pyrotechnicians with the forest and farmland they live on in South West France. A FIRELAND loosely follows pyrotechnicians Margot Auzier and Patrick Auzier, Margot’s father, who, in real life, live in a village in the Landes forest in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. But Convert’s work is neither fully fiction nor fully documentary, partly staged and partly observational. There’s a certain inescapable magical, or perhaps supernatural, quality to the film, arising in both visual and audio form. (Cineurope)