Benjamin Kling’s Interior Cinema
PerSo Award
By Thibaut Bertrand
France, 2021, 53′
Monday, Oct. 03, Méliès Cinema, Via della Viola 1, 7 p.m.
(Repeat) Tuesday, Oct. 04, Zenith Cinema, Via Benedetto Bonfigli 5, 3 p.m.
Original Title: Le Cinéma Intérieur de Benjamin Kling
Director, scriptwriter, sound engineer: Thibaut Bertrand
DOP and color grading: Cédric Davelut
Editing: Stefan Richter
Music: Guillaume Baurez and Romain Pascal
Sound mixing: Adrien Leblond
Producer: Alexis Taillant / Wendigo Films
Wendigo Films: Nadège Labé, Nicolas Lheureux, Mehdi Sahed
Produced for Alsace20, Canal32, ViàVosges, ViàMoselleTV
With the support of the CNC and Procirep-Angoa
SYNOPSIS
Benjamin Kling is an audio describer. He translates movies for blind and visually impaired viewers. After more than a hundred audio described films and series and while working on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion”, he feels the need to question his practice: is he too objective? Does he do justice to the films in all their diversity, in all their art, in the craft of the director?
To answer these questions, he decides to meet blind and visually impaired people from different backgrounds. He wants to learn more about their singular way of “watching” films (they insist on saying “watching a movie”) and their expectations about audio description. What can we learn, us as sighted persons, from their way of experiencing cinema?
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I became interested in audio description around 2009, when it became mandatory for the main TV networks in France to propose at least one audio described movie every week. However, it is only when I met Benjamin Kling, through a professional social network, that my project really took off. Over the phone we talked for hours about cinema. What stroke me the most is that even if he needs to watch twenty times the same movie when he works on its audio description, he was still passionate about it. Knowing so much about a movie did not seem to alter the art. He was also fully aware of the importance he has for his blind and visually impaired audience: his eyes, his subjectivity and his dedication are the only things that makes an honest transcription of a movie. That is why I decided to do a portrait of him, and behind him, a portrait of an audience we often let outside the movie theater.
Thibaut Bertrand
Thibaut Bertrand was born in the suburbs of Paris in 1988. It was during his studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière that he decided to dedicate himself to documentaries. During the shooting of a documentary commissioned by the school in a child hospital, he caught a glimpse of what could be mise-en-scène in the field of reality.
After graduating from Louis-Lumière, Thibaut participated in several documentary projects, either as a director of photography or as a scriptwriter. At the same time, he works in the field of contemporary art, for museums or helping artists create with video.
He then began to develop his own documentary projects, including “The Monster and The Artist”, about the artist Raymond Moretti and his hidden, unfinished and unclassifiable masterpiece, the Monster, which will be produced between 2017 and 2019. He also directs documentaries about cinema and pop culture for French TV. His favorite subjects are cinema, memory, art and contemporary history.
FILMOGRAPHY
THE MONSTER AND THE ARTIST (2019)
Portrait of the French artist Raymond Moretti through his hidden masterpiece The Monster.
APOCALYPSE NOLAN (2021)
Portrait of director Christopher Nolan in the midst of a pandemic.
BENJAMIN KLING’S INTERIOR CINEMA (2021)
Portrait of Benjamin Kling, whose job is translating movies for blind and visually-impaired people.
IT TAKES AN OCEAN NOT TO BREAK (2022)
Dreamt portrait of actor Sterling Hayden (Johnny Guitar, The Godfather, The Asphalt Jungle…) as the sailor he was supposed to be.