OLIVIER BOSSON
series
Le Forum des Rêves
A series, ten episodes, 20 mn
Production Offre Spéciale Films et L’image d’Après en Europe, Elegoa Cultural Productions.
With the support of CNC Dicréam, ]SCAN[ funds of région Rhône Alpes, CICLIC région Centre
A fiction about dreams
The principle behind this fiction is based on the fact that it is possible to record your dreams on your telephone. So you can see them again, you can share them on the Internet, and for example you can discuss them in a forum. “The Forum of Dreams” is a fictitious Internet forum for exchanges, mutual assistance and sharing with regard to the dream theme. The contributors talk with each other as they film themselves with their Webcams. The series is a sociological fiction about our relation to the new technologies.
A tour of international film shoots.
The production has been undertaken on the scale of the Web, in a grand tour of film shoots.
Twenty-two weeks of filming in six countries between 2012 and 2017, to film the 250 people of the forum : Canada, France, Belgium, Marocco, Luxembourg, Cuba.
“The Forum of Dreams” is organized as 10 topics filmed in an itinerant way in 20 towns and cities: Bobigny, Toronto, Dunkirk, Tours, La Havane, Montpellier, Paris, Caen, Nantes, Lyon, St Nazaire, Les Lilas, Casablanca, Saint Etienne, Esch sur Alzette, Liège, Saint Denis, Vénissieux...
Most of the actors were recruited locally during long casting calls.
Guest stars : des artistes, réalisateurs, écrivains contemporains : Louise Hervé et Chloé Maillet, Jean-Charles Massera, Benjamin Seror, Philippe Wicht, Céline Ahond, Emmanuelle Pireyre, Julien d'Abrigeon, Carmit Harash, Franck Wolff, Daniel Foucard, Frédéric Danos
Dedicated website: http://leforumdesreves.net
The site is presented as a website fiction, a fake video forum, augmented by a Bonus zone
Site production: C+R/Complexe-net
1 - “Help!!! First recordings of Rêves!", 2016, 20 min
Three weeks ago, LA_HUIT was offered a new telephone, fitted with a dream-recording application. It is happy with it, on the whole, it works well, except that since it has been using it, its dreams are no longer what they used to be. It goes to the forum, opens a new topic: “Has this happened to other people?” OB
7 – “The same dream as a person but in reverse”, 2017, 17 mn
Captain Nuage/Cloud has a very nice activity: she gives computer lessons to grown-up beginners at the Youth Centre. One day, she discovers that one of her students has had the same dream that she had. A dream about shoes in which someone says: “Welcome to the house of the foot”. The same dream, in fact, but not quite. Let’s say that it’s the same, but in reverse. OB
One question :
Mo Gourmelon: The dream that is subject to interpretation is a wonderful fiction machine. How did you become interested in dreams and why did you choose the website form?
Olivier Bosson: Well, I must admit that what triggered the theme of the dream was reading a book by Laurent Fabius.
In fact, one afternoon in 2004, fresh from my siesta, I realized that I was reading quite a few books that dealt with politics, books by philosophers, journalists, sociologists and anthropologists, but never books written by a politician. I said to myself that this involved a class bias, and that it was up to me to put things right. So I went to the local library, in Lomme, and found the shelf with “Books written by politicians”, where I came upon Laurent Fabius’s Le Coeur du Futur [“The Heart of the Future”], published by Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1984.
Quite something! In the book, Laurent Fabius, who was prime minister at the time, discovered the conversion from French socialism to liberalism, like a revelation. And he did so just when he decided to use a method that is greatly prized in politics: dreaming of the future. Incidentally, all this is explained by a character in Le Forum des Rêves, Recta, a professor of the history of dreams played by Céline Ahond; it’s in the first topic.
As far as the form is concerned, that’s another story. It was the La Valise collective in Nantes which, in 2010, invited some artists (Alain Bernardini, and others) to make a programme pilot, and invent a new audiovisual form. There I filmed the “Forum Possession”, the pilot episode for “Le Forum des Rêves”. Based on that, because I had a pilot, I thought that if I could develop a large enough number of discussion themes, that might create a whole forum—or a series! But I got off on the idea of making a fake website, a fiction site. We can all see what a fiction film is, but this was something else, a fiction that develops based on a logic that isn’t the logic of film, but rather that of webcam exchanges. I was very, very keen to explore that uncharted territory!
With dream sharing, the world is a surface on which people record their dreams. The relation between the private dream and the great dreams of humankind, the new meaning behind realizing dreams…
The old meaning tells you that the dream is premonitory. It harbingers the future that is about to unfold. The American meaning says that the dream is your project: human life consists in realizing dreams within a social, technical and entrepreneurial dynamic.