‘MASTERS: VIRGIL VERNIER’

“I only get excited about making films when I invent something that I’ve never seen before, with a new language.” With fourteen films of which six feature-length films, without a career plan and working on a low budget, Virgil Vernier (°1976) has made a name for himself as one of the most exciting French filmmakers of the moment. Freely navigating between fiction and documentary, he is involved in a unique exploration of today’s world. In a pseudo-ethnological mode, he records the mythologies behind signs, attitudes and objects that surround us.

His latest film Sophia Antipolis was filmed in a city on the Côte d’Azur. The city’s unusual architecture evokes past, present and future. Men and women are looking for a meaning, a social connection, a community, evolving under a dazzling sun with feelings of melancholy and anger. ​​​​​​​“I make films out of a desire to grasp what is timeless in our age, what can communicate with the archaic, and hence with the future. I look for what could be understandable to an ancient civilisation.”

Vernier has also acted in films by Justine Triet (Bataille de Solférino (Age of Panic)), Maïwenn (Polisse) and Pascal Bonitzer (Tout de suite maintenant). In addition, he wrote three picture books (Arcana) that attempt to set up an archive of the present day using a selection of documents from the media, advertising and the internet that characterise the 21st century.