The forest breathes deeper when eyes are closed. Nothing is fixed. Sound emerges, disappears, and weaves in the air. Within a drifting ritual, a wind charmer invites the unseen to sway along.
COUNTRY : France, Brazil YEAR : 2025 DURATION : 6m ARTIST, DIRECTOR : julie lobo SOUND DESIGN : Valê Ghiorzi CAST : Marion Loiseau FLUTE : Marion Loiseau COSTUME : Ana Scripca PRODUCTION ASSISTANT : Caio Francisco
Director statement : sway is an experimental film that begins with an intimate breath and merges with the living movement of nature. It is a sensory, almost ritual journey where body and landscape blend, and the human drifts within the world around them. In the forest, a flutist keeps her eyes closed. She listens, feels, and breathes, appearing and disappearing into the atmosphere. She may be seen as a wind-charmer, though it remains ambiguous whether she or the wind holds control.
Rather than telling a story, the film evokes a state of perception—a floating space between body and world. It opens an inner landscape where listening leads and the senses awaken. Rhythm, ambiguity and sound invite viewers to project their own sensations, to inhabit the film with presence, letting perception itself shape the journey. The gaze is not directed, but free to drift, to lose itself, to sway along.
Sound lies at the heart of the film. A hybrid composition of wind, textures, flute improvisations, breath, movement, and nature sounds forms a lively, shifting soundscape—a dialogue between isolation from civilization and connection with the earth, permeated by echoes of the invisible. The flutist does not play for herself alone: she invokes, she calls, awakening the forest’s spectres. With each breath, the air stirs, and the composition drifts into abstraction, leaving space for the viewer’s senses to wander within the film’s immersive atmosphere.
The soundtrack was created experimentally, recorded separately from the Super 8 images, allowing sound and image to coexist with subtle independence. Extracts from improvisation sessions with the flutist were combined with field recordings from Fontainebleau forest to create the final collage. In post-production, images and sound meet halfway: the soundtrack maintains its own rhythms while gradually building toward a climax, guiding the viewer through a flowing narrative shaped by a shared perceptual space.
Bio : julie lobo is a brazilian director based in Paris. Their practice combines essayistic experimentation with themes of poetry, memory and the unconscious, exploring the blurred line between reality and fiction.
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
