The Wonder Way

Interview with director Emmanuelle Antille

The Wonder Way is your second documentary film, after A Bright Light – Karen and the Process (2018), a road movie about the singer Karen Dalton. Is it a way to continue questioning the creative gesture?

First of all, The Wonder Way is a quest. The quest to find new worlds, parallel and different spaces; to understand why they have been created and how they can transform and inspire us. Can we reinvent the spaces we live in? How do we create our own universe? In our ultra-connected world, over-saturated with images and representations of the elsewhere, can we still imagine new territories?

It is from these issues that the film has found its starting point. It is from there that my desire to propose a parallel cartography was born. To try to answer them.

You explore all sorts of territories: intimate ones, celestical ones, artistic ones. How did you make these choices?

For several years, I researched and visited a large number of out-of-the-ordinary places, and not all of them are featured in this film. If I chose this selection, it is because of my artistic affinity, because they generate questions or simply to make people discover them, because they risk to disappear without ever having been shown. All these territories and works have in common their creative power, their determination and singularity. By going to meet extraordinary people, achievements or discoveries, the whole film speaks above all of territories as places of resistance, of creative gestures as acts of resilience. Do gestures and creative thinking allow us to survive, to better bear reality? To overcome ourselves and our limits? The Wonder Way tries to draw another way of approaching the world and reality. It is an opening towards new perspectives.

This film is at the border of documentary, essay, road-movie and art. The great originality of its style takes us from one world to another as if on an odyssey. How did you build it?

Indeed, The Wonder Way is not a catalog of gestures and territories, but a journey, a form of great crossing. In a way, it is a filmed poem. I work very freely with images, sounds and words to build a material. They are tools of inspiration and transformation to rebuild the idea of the elsewhere, of our limits and of our relationship to the world. In the end, the film is like a territory. It was built as an artistic gesture in itself to take us elsewhere. Like an attempt to walk from your room into the whole Universe.