La Traversée

Telling a strikingly topical story of migration through the drawings and paintings through the preparatory drawings and paintings for the film, this book offers a spellbinding plunge into Florence Miailhe’s dreamlike visual world.

In this sumptuous book, crafted like a sketchbook, readers will discover a selection of 147 paintings and sketches from Florence Miailhe’s never-before-seen work for her eponymous film.

Inspired by the author’s own family history, this initiatory journey of two teenagers, Kyona and Adriel, forced to flee their country, is told in two voices with Marie Desplechin. The wanderings into which the children are thrown also find their source in the many tales of children lost in war and displacement, foremost among them Aharon Appelfeld’s autobiographical novel, crossing war-torn Europe alone to the Mediterranean.

Each chapter alternates between drawings by the artist and short sequences from the film, reproduced frame by frame, showing the slide between the preparatory work and the final work.

A text by Xavier Kawa-Topor describes Florence Miailhe’s art, “an art of movement that plays not only with shapes and colors, but also with the material itself, its texture, thickness and fluidity, to produce gradations, nuances and transparencies. An art of continuous metamorphosis, of the overflowing of frames and contours that binds and carries everything away.”