Directed by François Ouf

Logline: There's no escape from the flatlands

Synopsis: A speechless cowboy drifts across the frontier. He halts at a lone gravestone on the plains, where an older gunslinger meets him. The old man taunts him about the person buried there, someone they both knew. They draw their guns. Thunder rumbles. A shot is fired and seems to shatter the plains, transporting us to a glitchy pink realm where a fairy dances endlessly. When the glitch subsides, the old man lies dead on the plains. The cowboy walks toward him, and then through him. He wanders off into the sunset, but never disappears under the horizon.

Distribution Contact: WFG

More Details

RUNTIME: 5 Minutes
GENRE: Animation, Experimental, Narrative/Fiction
PRODUCTION FORMAT: HD, Computer Animation, Augmented Reality (AR)
LANGUAGE: English
LOCATION: Quebec
KEYWORDS: Western, Death, Existence, Digital Environments, Cowboys, Grave, Black & White, Computer Animation, Machinima, Fairy, Pink, Google Street View, Glitch

Director's Statement: Le plat pays was made during the pandemic lockdowns, mostly by myself and without ever leaving my bedroom. I imagined the film after spending hours wandering Google Street View, looking for an escape in the digital shadows of real landscapes. I taught myself how to crudely animate a couple of cowboys and "filmed" them on the Mongolian plains, using a smartphone, a computer screen displaying Street View, and augmented reality software. I scavenged the Internet for the building materials I was missing : a voice performance from an old French-dubbed western, a YouTube karaoke version of a Brel song, etc. All of this was repurposed into Le plat pays, a short tale of loneliness on the digital frontier.