Elegy for a Lighthouse

Directed by Dominique de Rivaz

Documentary |2013| 56 min

Produced by Louise Productions Vevey

Synopsis

She has just lost her father. A short news in a magazine draws her attention to a lighthouse condemned to be extinguished soon at the North coast of Russia. She suddenly knows where she needs to go. But will she be too late again, as she was when her father passed away? What is it that draws her there? The lighthouse that will no longer be? Will there be someone waiting for her? The lighthouse keeper? Maybe will he know how to find solace.

She believes that over there, between the White Sea and the Barent Sea, three hundred verst beyond the Arctic Circle, her mourning will take another sense. In Shoyna, the once so proud fishing port that is no more, devoured by the advancing sand dunes, her sorrow turns into an as fascinating as repulsive curiosity for this strange place where shipwrecks of trawlers and human bones are littering the sand dunes.

Death in Shoyna goes hand in hand with life.
Her life.

At low tide, buried memories of her father merge when he took her at the French Atlantic coast. She was five years old. And she remembers this picture of her, a thoughtful little girl on the steps of a spiral staircase, the one of a Breton lighthouse...

Is it this remote image in her deep inner self that has made her become a filmmaker? In her mysterious search for a place to mourn, it seems that her quest makes suddenly sense.

Credits

A film by : Dominique de Rivaz

Image and sound : Dmitrij Leltschuk & Dominique de Rivaz

Editing : Prune Jaillet

Narrator : Anna Martinella

Writer : Dominique de Rivaz

Script consultant: Prune Jaillet & Jan Peters

Producer : Heinz Dill

Additional camera : Olivier Kunz

Sound editing and mix : Peter von Siebenthal

Colorgrading : Christoph Walther

Music :