DIANE GUAIS

French fashion filmmaker, Diane Guais depicts utopias of innocence, youth and purity. Her films are a glowing sanctuary amongst the chaos of contemporary existence.

“One powerful drop of water is enough to create a world and to dissolve the night. To dream power, all it takes is one drop imagined in depth. Water thus energized is a germ; it gives life an inexhaustible boost. (...) I always find the same melancholy in front of still waters, a very special melancholy that has the colour of a pond in a humid forest, a melancholy without oppression, dreamy, slow, calm. (...) It is near the water and its flowers that I have best understood that reverie is a universe in emanation, a fragrant breath that comes out of things through a dreamer.”

L’EAU ET LES RÊVES, GASTON BACHELARD

Personally, I perceive strong themes of nature being a sanctuary. Where do you think this comes from?

That's a fair point. I grew up in the middle of a forest, which has always been my sanctuary and home of my inspirations.

What initially drew you to film?

As a child, a desire, let's say almost uncontrolled, to extract my emotions in a temporal and visual matter.

Women are more often exhibited in your work than men, or any other gender. What instigated this?

Women symbolize the universal feminine, be it in man, woman, or any other gender. This universal feminine represents for me a high state of being: the creative force, the intuition, the dream, the unconscious, the introspection. It is from this universe where my creative impulse comes from.

There is, to me, such a strong atmosphere of innocence in your work. Would you agree with this? And if so, where does this come from?

If innocence is the mark of childhood then I agree. Since my practice itself is rooted in childhood. It is the birthplace of the milestones of our existence.

Likewise, I wonder what inspires the sense of purity and naturalness that can be gaged from your work?

I did not stop creating like a child with her dreams, her imagination, her colours, her existential questions. It is from this prism that I will explain it.

I was first mesmerised with your work because of the way I related to your editing style and expression of colour. How would you describe your relationship with colour?

A colour is a language, an emotion, a symbol. It holds great power, suggestive and psychic. As for a premeditation of colour in my work, it is most often a spontaneous gush, like a large part of my creative process. And when it comes to fashion, clothing brings colour into the picture, "the tone" so to speak.

Your work reminds me, at times, of a calm, slowed down, classical female voice singing, almost like a mermaid singing underwater. How do you relate to your different senses when it comes to your work?

I really like that comparison. My senses are exalted, I belong to the category of people who are called "hypersensitive". I would say, unsurprisingly, that it is the visual sense that predominates in me. The olfactory sense would be the second. Cinema/video are the mediums that I find very olfactory in their ability to remind me of a perfume, the wind in the branches of a tree yellowed by autumn, the sound of cicadas in a meadow under a blazing sun.

How would you describe a non-existent abode you wish for, your paradise?

My paradise looks like a big house in the middle of the woods, where my friends/sister-souls and I would live together, close to nature and the depth of their being.