KINTSUGI
a film shot in Costa Rica in 2023, an Envers Compagnie production, 2025.
A film written and directed
by Manuela Morgaine
Cinematography, Sound & Voice: Manuela Morgaine
Picture & Sound Editing & Original Score: Samuel Didi
Kintsugi – golden joinery – is a traditional Japanese art of mending broken porcelain or ceramics with lacquer dusted with powdered gold.
Spiritually, Kintsugi chooses to reveal an object’s fracture and repair as intrinsic to its history, rather than veiling them in secrecy.
It embodies resilience, the grace of life’s scars, the transmutation of fault lines into lines of strength.
I think like a mountain. I breathe like a jungle. I climb and sway like an ape. I am wild nature, Pura Vida. I am Archipelago. I am a gathering of islands. I am continents. I am the All-World. I am the World without end. I dwell before the end of the world. I am the virgin forest, still untouched. Before my eyes unfold all the shapes of the living before the very inception of the first Atlas. Before the inception of a border, before the inception of any rift, of any realm, before the inception of all injustice, all violence, all human terror. I inhabit the dawn of animal prey and predator. I am in the milky age. The age of eternal youth. I am prehistory. It is here, nestled in the heart of Costa Rica, within the Osa Peninsula, to the southwest, along the Pacific Ocean. It is Corcovado. I am the natural park most intensely alive with biological diversity in the world. I am forest, I am mountain forest, I am cloud forest, I am lowland forest, I am swamp forest, I am the Yolillal, the grassy marshland, I am mangrove. I soothe the convulsions of climate change. I weave biomass, woody beings such as the mangrove tree. I am mangrove with my breath-seeking pneumatophores and stilt roots. I am oxygen for subterranean, drowned roots. Pura vida. In Costa Rica, on the Osa Peninsula, at the very heart of the Corcovado Natural Park, for the first time I thought like a mountain, I breathed like a jungle, I climbed and swayed like an ape. For the first time, here, paradise is no longer lost.
BEST FOREIGN EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM AWARD AT THE LONDON INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2025.
“Beyond the Stars” Award
FOR WAAD
An archival film of pre-war Syria
Produced by Envers Compagnie & Utopie Films, 2021
Screened for the first time during the festival
UN ÉTAT DU MONDE, FORUM DES IMAGES, PARIS 2021.
Istanbul International Film Festival,
Varese Film Festival,
Jaipur International Film Festival,
Andromeda Film Festival,
Five Continents Film Festival,
New Delhi International Film Festival.
FOR WAAD is a cinematic epistle, echoing the film FOR SAMA
crafted in Aleppo in 2016 by the Syrian director and journalist Waad Al Kateab.
Composed entirely of archival footage captured in pre-war Syria
between 2005 and 2007, FOR WAAD juxtaposes
and overlays onto traumatic visions of death and ruin,
luminous portraits of the living and a sumptuous heritage.
Trailer
LIGHTNING
a legend in four seasons
Produced by Mezzanine Films & Envers Compagnie, 2013
SCREENED FOR THE FIRST TIME AT THE ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2013
BRIGHT FUTURE SECTION.
This fresco is a zigzagging cinema, tracing the fractured branches of a lightning strike.
It charts its course across multiple lands of the earth
and across centuries, simultaneously,
through a documentary and mythic form.
Award for the Most Fruitful Search for the Springs of the Impossible
Saint Petersburg Festival 2013
Best Film Award, Cinemistica Festival of Granada 2019
DVD Box Set released by SHELLAC
GO
A Cine-Concert
35mm film, 22′ – 1999.
In 1756, at thirty-two years of age, Casanova slips away from the Leads prison
in Venice. At sixty-two, in the French tongue, he recounts the tale.
An escape re-composed from whole cloth by a libertine watching his life unspool once more.
Va plays out in this deferred, reimagined time.
Escape plan through words (the actor)
then through sounds (the Foley artist).
Tragicomedy of a solitary man replaying his life.
Va is a performance or film-concert.
Va is Casanova’s spectral word. Va acts as the relic of a mythical figure—what remains of him.
A 35mm film is projected onto an outdoor or indoor screen
(to be determined according to the space), before which stands a Foley artist.
A continuous speaking sequence shot summons the sights and sounds of Casanova’s 1756 escape from the Leads prison
in Venice, embodied by actor Yann Collette.
Throughout the entire narrative, reaching from 1756 into the present day,
he runs upon a mechanical treadmill.
Then a sequence of silent close-ups of Casanova’s face,
severed from the preceding sequence shot, magnifies the dimension
of a recomposed memory.
A Foley artist, Cyril Hernandez, facing the screen before his suitcases
laden with accessories (keys, bedsheets, the sound of footsteps…)
reconstructs the escape plan in sound.
Casanova’s escape—the Venetian hero’s mad dash in 1756—
seems to stretch into our twenty-first century within the suspended realm
of the 22-minute performance.
POSTHUMES
16mm black and white film, 11′, 1994
Production: Envers Compagnie & Bibliothèque Municipale de Nantes
Cinematographic poem in memoriam.
It wanders from the Rue Saint-Denis (flesh) to the Basilica of Saint-Denis (stone),
turning bodies into stages of representation, whispering low masses to the departed,
striving to wrest a breath from them.
Watch the film