La Mer Endormie, Apprendre à Parler à une Pierre
(The Sleeping Sea,Teaching a Stone To Talk)
2025-2026
experimental manifesto film 15’
first screening in Les Champs Libres in Rennes from April 28th 2026
In La Mer Endormie (The sleeping Sea), an experimental manifesto film of 15’, Manon Lanjouère plays a woman who we imagine to be the last survivor of a world after a catastrophe. Alone on a deserted coast, she invents a ritual: collecting fossil fragments, traces of extinct species, then returning them to the ocean. Her gesture is twofold: rebellion against the destruction of life and care for what remains. With each throw, the stone, touching the water matrix, seems to come back to life. A vibration weaves between body, matter and sea, as if the dormant ecosystem were still whispering.
This work was born in the shadow of the sixth extinction, haunted by ecological urgency. Lanjouère draws inspiration from the ecofeminists of the 1970s, who had already sensed the coming ruin and countered fear with rituals of joy, songs, danced spirals, and a collective energy that reinvented hope. Their thinking permeates the film: here, putting one's body on the line is not about performing, but about affirming the possibility of repair, of a renewed connection to the Living.
The protagonist's actions are reminiscent of the ancient practices of shellfish gathering and seaweed harvesting, but in reverse: no longer taking, but giving back. This repeated, cyclical action becomes an endless task, an ecological Sisyphean labour. Yet, far from despair, she finds a solemn joy in it: as in Camus, the struggle itself gives meaning.
With a view to clean and environmentally friendly production, the chemicals usually required to develop film have been replaced by a mixture of seaweed and sea water, giving the images a unique aesthetic. The film, which focuses on the sea and its preservation, was made in close collaboration with the sea itself and the knowledge of Nina Cholet (movie director working on artisanal and eco-responsible development.)
The fixing of the images using sea water creates a crystallisation that gives the film a living quality.
Her protocol aims to link the creative act to the symbolism of life, placing the work within a scientific and poetic approach that symbolises the transition from inertia to life. The process becomes a material metaphor for the myth: seawater, as a primordial matrix, sculpts and transforms the film, an inert and rigid surface, into a crystalline and vibrant work.
La Mer Endormie is thus a fable of sensitive resistance, where art, gesture and the body become a force for repair, a call to relearn how to love the world before it withdraws.
This work was born in the shadow of the sixth extinction, haunted by ecological urgency. Lanjouère draws inspiration from the ecofeminists of the 1970s, who had already sensed the coming ruin and countered fear with rituals of joy, songs, danced spirals, and a collective energy that reinvented hope. Their thinking permeates the film: here, putting one's body on the line is not about performing, but about affirming the possibility of repair, of a renewed connection to the Living.
The protagonist's actions are reminiscent of the ancient practices of shellfish gathering and seaweed harvesting, but in reverse: no longer taking, but giving back. This repeated, cyclical action becomes an endless task, an ecological Sisyphean labour. Yet, far from despair, she finds a solemn joy in it: as in Camus, the struggle itself gives meaning.
With a view to clean and environmentally friendly production, the chemicals usually required to develop film have been replaced by a mixture of seaweed and sea water, giving the images a unique aesthetic. The film, which focuses on the sea and its preservation, was made in close collaboration with the sea itself and the knowledge of Nina Cholet (movie director working on artisanal and eco-responsible development.)
The fixing of the images using sea water creates a crystallisation that gives the film a living quality.
Her protocol aims to link the creative act to the symbolism of life, placing the work within a scientific and poetic approach that symbolises the transition from inertia to life. The process becomes a material metaphor for the myth: seawater, as a primordial matrix, sculpts and transforms the film, an inert and rigid surface, into a crystalline and vibrant work.
La Mer Endormie is thus a fable of sensitive resistance, where art, gesture and the body become a force for repair, a call to relearn how to love the world before it withdraws.
