“Maurice Pialat is a filmmaker who made me start to take an interest in film realism. In his work it’s such a different kind of realism and it’s often so physical that it becomes abstract, metaphysical. At least that’s how I’d describe The Mouth Agape, in which, via the simple premise of a family gathering, Pialat demonstrates that death and sexuality are inseparably linked.” – Olmo Omerzu. Viewers really do get a strange feeling when they see the film’s precisely scanned details of real life, and the way the plot unfolds seems authentic as well; nothing is artificially dramatised, no static or insubstantial moments have been excluded. And yet, we get a clear sense that the significance of the piece hangs somewhere high above these almost pedantically recorded minutiae. The earthy expression gueule in the film’s title isn’t meant as a vulgarity, as it might seem at first, and, by the time the closing credits roll, the word has acquired a quite different meaning.

Introduced by Olmo Omerzu