Vinciane Despret

Film

Where do people go when they die? How do you tell children that nobody really knows, but that you have to imagine it? Our cultural tradition offers answers that are, it has to be said, rather limited – either you go to heaven, or you no longer exist at all, except in the memories of the living. In other cultures, we find far more imaginative ways of offering the dead the opportunity to make their presence felt, for a while, and of course in a different way. Provided we take care of them.

Elioth is getting ready to go to sleep. In the frame on his bedside table we see him and his grandmother, both smiling. He closes his eyes and, when he opens them, she’s there again, just as she was when she was alive. She takes him on a trip. There’s a little dead bird that makes the forest sing, and then a boy who pays out an Ariadne’s thread so that his grandfather’s soul can find its way home to Georgia. Their adventure takes them to a cemetery in Mexico, where a little girl teaches Elioth that you can still celebrate with the dead. And in Vietnam, Elioth will be able to give his grandmother a beautiful floral dress – all he has to do is draw it and burn it. When he wakes up, Elioth will realise that his grandmother has come to help him answer his questions. And the picture in the frame will tell him that her present has reached her, wherever she is.

Vinciane Despret

Vinciane Despret was born in 1959 in Anderlecht, Belgium. She is a philosopher and often writes about animals and sometimes about relationships with the dead. In 2015 she published *Au bonheur des morts. Récits de ceux qui restent;* in 2019, *Habiter en oiseau* and, in 2021, *Autobiographie d’un poulpe.* In collaboration with Lou Le Forban. Lou Le Forban was born in Marseille in 1997. She studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Le Fresnoy – Studio national. A multimedia artist, she works with film, embroidery and painting. In 2025, she exhibited at the FRAC Île de France, at “100% l’Expo” at the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, and with the LaM – Lille Métropole, musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut, at La Condition Publique in Roubaix.

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