Against a Hierarchy of Images

Are there certain films that impressed you both while you were at film school?

Vinel: It was basic cinephilia in the beginning: Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, Robert Bresson. The common thread running through all our inspirations was a cinema driven by feeling rather than by storytelling and narrative. That’s what we wanted to achieve with As Long As Shotguns Remain as well. We tried to evoke the boredom that comes with growing up in a small, sleepy town in Southern France. It’s easy to give in to a desire for violence here because there’s nothing to do. It becomes a way to exist, to face the trials of the world.

Poggi: When you grow up there, you want to break out of this inherent emptiness. Violence, then, can feel like the sole solution. We try to think about the origins of this without condemning it in our stories.

It’s not a spoiler when I say that the kind of violence discussed in As Long As Shotguns Remain stems from the suicide of a friend.

Poggi: Yes, the idea for the film started with a letter Jonathan received from his mother. In it, she wrote that someone from his village, roughly the same age as him, had died by suicide, which made her very sad. This wasn’t an isolated event. We felt that we were constantly surrounded by news of this kind, so we wanted to find a cinematic form to examine this.

Vinel: I think we felt the need to explore this more closely in the suburbs and neighbourhoods we come from. Its modes of living actively contribute to a special kind of despair. There’s no one in the streets. The houses are all isolated from one another. Communal spaces in which people can come together don’t really exist.

You won the Golden Bear with this film in 2014. What did this do or change for you?

Poggi: I think that our film was quite radical then and it still is in some sense, so winning a Golden Bear for it was a massive encouragement. I don’t think we would be here today without it. It motivated us to continue developing a very specific aesthetic that isn’t the easiest to produce.

We actually rewatched the film at the beginning of this year. When it ended, I told Jonathan that we wouldn’t be able to make this film again now that we’re both 35. It really speaks to a state of mind in which we were still very attached to our youth and our hometown. It’s difficult, really. There is this violence present that we hate, but it’s also just the place where we grew up, where we learned to love. I think the film contains both extremes at once.

Vinel: Our work has become a lot more hybrid, but I feel that our debut still flows through it in many ways. We still research the fight against violence and how this manifests in the body, but we do try to make it more joyful now. In As Long As Shotguns Remain, our characters had simply accepted the apocalypse. The only solution for them was to die. It was much colder, much harder.

The internet plays a major role in your films too.

Vinel: I think our trajectory really is defined by a search for giving this a rightful place within cinema as a medium. When you go to film school, there is a certain classification, a hierarchy of images: some are seen as noble and cinematic and others as “lower class”. I was really obsessed with video games in my first year of film school, for example, but I felt like I needed to give this up to watch more films because their imagery wasn’t noble enough to be used. Now I know this “low-class” imagery is important because it speaks to the times we live in now in so many different ways.

Poggi: Our first film was made when Tumblr was still a big thing. The internet has always influenced our work in many different ways. Using it as a starting point feels very natural. It’s like having a third arm that you use instinctively.

With Notre Heritage (2016), the internet was at the centre of our film for the first time. In it, we used real footage of Pierre Woodman, who became famous in the nineties with porn castings he shot in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His videos were all over the internet back then. Through the story of his fictional son, who wonders if his father was ever in love with one of the girls in the videos, we try to question the weight of pornography on our generation. How can we still love when we grew up with imagery like this?

Vinel: Woodman’s pornographic images were solely created to masturbate to. The idea for us was to place them in a different context and strip them of their initial purpose. We wanted to notice the violent power dynamics behind it.

Cinema is considered noble, and pornography is not. That’s what I love about your work: you challenge the myth of the “hierarchy of images”—there is none. Is that also why animation entered your universe, such as in Comment ça va? (2025).

Vinel: Animation came to us through video games; we repurpose images on the internet to express something new. It lets us collaborate with friends on a smaller scale.

Poggi: It can be really frustrating to wait on financing while the rest of the world keeps moving, so using animation gives us a way to keep working. But because we don’t have major-studio resources, we have to work within our own limitations. This tends to welcome imperfections like bugs and glitches, but in the end it’s about the stories you tell with it. Machinima and pornography are also ways for us to talk about more violent or radical things, while keeping a distance. It’s so different to have an animated 3D baby talk to you about political things than to watch a real actor.