Piqueuses

by Kate Tessa Lee
and Tom Schön

Rodrigues, a longtime isolated island impacted by modernization and climate change. A time of transition in which cultural markers are shifting and local self-improvised ways of subsistence are falling into disuse. Amidst which, the decline of a once prosperous, emancipated community of traditional octopus spearers, known as “piqueuses ourite”.

Marie Louise Édouard is one of them. “Piqueuse ourite” since the age of twelve, her world has been shaped by the language of the spear, the sea, the tides and the lunar cycles. Today the métier is no longer sustainable and in her late fifties, she finds herself at the dawn of uncertainty. Far from the sea, she continues to search and live her new reality through the resilient ways of the past.

With radical subtlety and poetic allusion, PIQUEUSES portraits the stoical stand of a woman amidst the onward march of the world.

KATE TESSA LEE:
In PIQUEUSES, our primary concern was not to tell a story but rather to construct a film-experience. A film-experience that one could live through as a curious object of contemplation, oscillating between concrete situations and moments of daydream; or like an open system of interrelated images and sounds, alluding to the cyclic reality of a "piqueuses ourite" – one that is, at the same time, strangely fragmented, fragile, haunted, unstable, absurd and yet, extremely mundane. In that regards, we took the risk to be “essencialists” – that is, to make a film based, mainly, on the essence and interpretative force of the unspoken: on the realm of perceptions, impressions, visions, images, sounds, gestures, gazes, allegoric tableaus and visual poetic suggestions.

Feature
84 minutes | Germany 2019

WHO

cast MARIE LOUISE EDOUARD, GUY DOWELL JEAN LOUIS, BERNADIN AUGUSTIN, LALAL GHIONAL AUGUSTIN, JAQUES DÉSIRÉ ABDOOL, ANNIE JANE COLIN & MARIE ALICE LEOPOLD-JEAN LOUIS script, direction, camera KATE TESSA LEE script, direction, sound recording, sound design, montage TOM SCHÖN color grading TIMM KRÖGER sound mix JAIME GUIJARRO BUSTAMANTE original music JAQUELIN LEGENTIL

produced by LEE & SCHÖN & US