The Wonder Way, the fifth film by artist Emmanuelle Antille, is an exploration in search of extraordinary territories, terrestrial or celestial paradises, fascinating and uncharted. It's a timeless journey to meet those who imagine other worlds in this world. With the exceptional participation of Didier Queloz, physicist and winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The film screening will be preceded by a presentation by the director and a talk by Didier Queloz, who will talk about his role in the film and his current astrophysics research.
THE FILM : The Wonder Way takes the path of wonder to represent creativity in all its forms and the forces of dreams. It shows individuals capable of creating worlds: phantasmagorical worlds, fairytale worlds, parallel worlds. We meet a couple of artists who intervene between the map and the territory to represent the void. A miner from Pas-de-Calais recreates a Garden of Eden. A pastor performs a religious ceremony with snakes. We visit Phantasma Gloria in Randyland, Los Angeles, a gigantic translucent installation made of multicoloured bottles. Climb the steps of Charles Ross's Star Axis, an architectural sculpture that places our planet on the cosmic clock. Physicist Didier Queloz talks about exoplanets.
We find ourselves between dream and reality, between the imaginary and science, in a reality that is intensified by the power of fiction and imagination. Emmanuelle Antille wonders: "By going out to meet extraordinary characters and achievements, the film speaks above all of territories as places of resistance, of artistic gestures as acts of resilience. Do gestures and creative thinking enable us to survive ?"
The Wonder Way won the Special Jury Prize in the Swiss Competition at Visions du Réel in 2023.
Emmanuelle Antille was born in Lausanne in 1972. She studied at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art Visuel (ESAV) in Geneva and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Since 1995, she has been developing her practice both as a video artist and as a filmmaker. Her award-winning work has been shown at the Kunstverein in Frankfurt, the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the National Gallery in Reykjavik, the Tokyo Wonder Site, De Appel in Amsterdam, the Migros Museum in Zurich and the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris. In 2003, she represented Switzerland at the 50th Venice Biennale. In 2012, she directed her third feature film, AVANTI, starring Hanna Schygulla and Miou-Miou. Discovery Prize at the Namu FIFF. In 2028, she directed A BRIGHT LIGHT - KAREN AND THE PROCESS about the American singer Karen Dalton. Award for Best Documentary at the Dock of the Bay in San Sebastian.
Didier Queloz is a physicist, astrophysicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics (2019). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and since September 2021 Professor of Physics at ETH Zurich. Didier Queloz is at the origin of the "exoplanet revolution" in astrophysics. In 1995, as part of his doctoral work at the University of Geneva, he and his thesis supervisor, Professor Michel Mayor, announced that they had discovered a giant planet orbiting its sun, the star 51 Pegasi, which lies outside our solar system. The detection of this exoplanet was made possible by the development of a new type of spectrograph built at the Observatoire de Haute Provence, and by the implementation of a radically new scientific approach that he devised to accurately measure stellar radial velocity. He and Michel Mayor were awarded the BBVA Prize in 2011 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019 for this discovery, which launched the field of exoplanet research. Over the course of his career, Didier Queloz has detected several hundred planets and measured some of their physical parameters. He is extending his research programme into the search for life in the Universe, with the main objective of defining the minimum conditions for the pre-biotic origin of life, combining chemical and astrophysical constraints.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:
Presentation and speech by Didier Queloz: 40 minutes
Screening time: 1h35 Free entrance
