Le Vicinal

I consider LE VICINAL to be my first film, shot while I lived in Pays de Caux, after art school. It was also my only experience shooting on rolls of film. What I wanted to film was my encounter with Marcel Pilate. It happened one summer when I was still in art school. For the second year in a row, I worked at a grain silo, receiving the barley. It was in this mid-summer boredom that I went looking for a beekeeper in the phone book. I stumbled upon this name: Marcel Pilate; that was really something. I called around noon and he told me to come over. I went that afternoon on my bike, from my parents’ house in Saint-Wandrille, about 10 kilometers away. Marcel Pilate, beekeeper, rue de l’Oiseau bleu. I was dazzled by him, by the beekeeping. I ended up going there the entire summer and once again in September after classes had started again, for the honey extraction process. I did the same the following summer, in 1990. I would work for him, with him, without pay, I was learning. Marcel Pilate was the first hero of my films. Back then, I had no idea about how to write a script. It was a little handwritten booklet with drawings and plans. A topography. This is what I want to convey in this film: the location of the house, of the hive, of the school in the town, but also of a big open dump close to my house, where fires rage, something like a big manure heap. (Pierre Creton)