Slides That Follow Your Voice: French Accent Film Introduction

Slide 1: Line 14

0:16Good evening. Thank you for coming, and thank you for choosing this room, because the other room has the comedy, and I know, because I could hear the laughing while I was waiting outside. It is fine. We have the bus. [chuckles]

0:30My name is Camille, I directed the film you are about to see, and I am supposed to talk for five minutes and then uh, disappear, which is a thing I have never managed in my life, so somebody should watch the clock.

Slide 2: Five minutes, and then I disappear

0:44The film is called Line fourteen, and it is about one night bus in a city I will not name, because the city asked me not to, which tells you something about the city. It is eighty-four minutes long. Sorry, eighty-six, we added a shot. It was filmed over eleven months, between midnight and five in the morning, on the same bus, with the same driver, a woman called Nadia who has driven that route for eighteen, no, nineteen years and who agreed to the film on one condition, which was that I did not make her look brave. She said, I am not brave, I am on a schedule. I have tried to respect that.

Slide 3: 86 minutes, filmed over 11 months

1:22Why a bus. People ask. It is a strange route, it goes nowhere useful, which is maybe why it is interesting.

Slide 4: How it started

1:30In two thousand, in, when was it, twenty twenty-one, yes. In twenty twenty-one I was making a different film, about something serious, and it was not working, and one night I missed the last metro and took the fourteen instead, and I sat at the back and watched the people, and by the terminus I had forgotten the important film completely.

1:52There was a man with a cello. There was a nurse asleep against the window who woke up exactly at her stop, every time, I later learned, for nine years. There was a boy of maybe seventeen who got on at the hospital and got off at the hospital, one hour later, having gone all the way round, and said nothing to anyone.

Slide 5: The people on the bus

2:15I did not film them that night. I still do not know what he was doing. I have a theory. I will keep the theory to myself, because then you would watch for it, and it is better without. Sorry. That was, how do you say, a tease. It was not meant as a tease. Anyway. I came back the next night, and the next, and in the end the city gave me a permit for the bus, and not for the city, and so the film is only the bus.

Slide 6: A permit for the bus, not for the city

2:44What you will see is not a story, okay? There is no arc. Nadia drives, people get on and people get off, it rains for twenty minutes or so in the middle, and the cello comes back two times.

Slide 7: Not a story

2:56I was told by a very kind man at a funding body that it needed a structure, and I said the structure is the route, and he said that is not a structure, and he was right, and we made it anyway. Some people find it slow. My mother found it slow. She also watched it three times, so, it three times, so. [laughs]

3:17Two practical things. The sound is quiet on purpose. Do not ask the projectionist to turn it up, he has been told, and he has opinions. He is behind you. He is waving. Hello, Marc. He does not like being mentioned. Voilà, I have mentioned him. No? Okay.

Slide 8: Two practical things

3:36And if you need to leave, leave, it is a bus, people leave buses, it is the subject.

3:43I will be here afterwards, by the door, if you want to talk, and if you do not, that is also fine. Nadia is not here. She is driving. It is Thursday. [sighs] She said she would come to the next one, if there is a next one, if it is not a Thursday, and if nobody asks her to stand up. I have agreed to all of this. I would agree to anything for Nadia, honestly, that is the problem with the film.

Slide 9: Nadia is not here. She is driving.

4:10Thank you, and here is Line fourteen.