Hotel Silence film set | Léa Pool and her ode to life

Léa Pool completed the shooting of her next feature film on Tuesday, Hotel Silence. Starring Sébastien Ricard, the film explores the power of deep encounters and the pre-eminence of life when death threatens. The Press attended part of the last day of filming.

It is the story of a man, Jean, who wants to end his life. He leaves his home to kill himself, but meets people, in a country hit by war, who give him the desire to exist again. It is the story of two miseries that intersect, the one that one lives inside, the one that the others have suffered from the outside.

It’s also the story of “women and war”, says Léa Pool, whom we met in Châteauguay, on the set ofHotel Silence. The film is an adaptation of the novel Gold, by Icelandic author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. The screenwriter and director is preparing a work in line with the cinema we know her to be. “In his films, there is always a subtle mix between a social outlook and a great sensitivity from a psychological point of view. It’s not just drama, it’s drama in their societies, ”describes Paul Ahmarani, who plays a role in two scenes of the film, met during filming.

He knew the original work because his wife read all of Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s books.

But the actor says it straight away: what led him to this project above all was the desire to work with Léa Pool.

A few minutes later, when questioned in turn, Sébastien Ricard, who plays Jean, tells us exactly the same thing. “It’s the fact that it’s her who directs that challenged me at the start,” he says. That she thought of me for this role makes me extremely happy. It’s a very beautiful role. »

Sébastien Ricard grants us an interview on the set where he was playing a scene from the beginning of the film a few moments earlier. The team of a few dozen people takes a lunch break before officially completing the 28 days of filming for Hotel Silence. The wind is blowing, but it’s a beautiful day for exterior shots. Today’s scene, however, is part of the darkest part of the film, where we see the despair that the main character experiences before leaving Quebec, Sébastien Ricard tells us.

Jean is “disillusioned and discouraged by life”, sums up the actor. “Then he goes somewhere else to die, but he finds himself rebuilding himself thanks to the encounters he makes. A sentence from the book, which represents a key idea of ​​the film, particularly marked him: “You have to look your suffering in the face to share that of others. »

pain and light

Hotel Silence tackles this theme of suffering head-on. Léa Pool tells us about it as something that we can neither measure nor compare. “When you suffer, you suffer,” says the Canadian-Swiss director. When Jean arrives in this nameless country just emerging from war, his inner pain is no worse or more bearable than that of the people he meets there. But by being confronted with what they have experienced, his perspective changes, he gradually finds meaning in his own life.

“He discovers them, he tinkers for these people who have just taken over the hotel where he is staying,” she says. He becomes attached to Anna’s 6-year-old boy, the girl who runs the hotel, who doesn’t speak, who is traumatized by the war. It’s a movie that’s dark at the start, but which goes towards solidarity, mutual aid and light. »

Léa Pool thus adapts the novel Gold, a book published in about twenty languages ​​and which she read about four years ago. Immediately afterwards, she wrote to the author, explaining to her what kind of cinema she does and why she saw a connection between them. Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir had never licensed any of her novels before. “I think she heard me,” said Léa Pool, smiling softly. She told me okay. »

Léa Pool’s determination

Filming completed on Tuesday, post-production can begin. Hotel Silence is slated to hit the big screen in the fall. For Sébastien Ricard, the film is like a reminder “that life is stronger than anything”.

“We live in an extremely harsh society. The only hope we can have between human beings is to have this solidarity and to know that we are part of the same humanity, says Léa Pool. Jean writes in a notebook throughout the story and he gives it to Anna at the end. The last sentence he writes is: “Sometimes it only takes one meeting to make everything possible again.” It is the deep encounters and the understanding of the other that make it possible to continue to hope. »

Hope, it took him a lot (and work, too) to bring the project to life Hotel Silence. “To make cinema, you have to really want, you have to fight and you need a lot of resilience,” says the director with more than 40 years of experience. After my first refusal from SODEC [qui finance les productions], I told my director of photography that this film was going to be made, that it would take the time it would take, but that I was not going to let go. I had to make this movie. »