White mirrored smoke is pulsed from the dark background towards the camera. Finally letting go of realist constraints, and going back to the mirror-images of some of Provost’s famous previous works, we are diving into a cosmic ocean of ever metamorphosing baroque circumvolutions in which our minds try to capture reassuring forms before letting the ghostly demons blur our vision.

New York and American cop land with its howling police cars, uniforms, ambulances, and crowded streets, very soon turn into a perfect filmic scenery of a nation in fear. PLOT POINT questions the boundaries of reality and fiction, the codes of cinema and the narrative tools (planting, foreshadowing, aftermath, tension curve, climax, plot point), playing with our filmic memory.
We are so familiar with and influenced by the fiction film language that reality completely dissappears if we want it to. In PLOT POINT all the actions and characters are real people in real life, filmed with a hidden camera through the cinematic eye of the filmmaker and without any set up or instructions.

Gravity is a long passionate film kiss in which multiple kissing scenes from different films are woven in eachother by switching every 3 frames between two scenes. The reassuring world of multiplied cinematographic kisses is shattered by a stroboscopic effect that plunges and looses us into the dizzying vertigo of the embrace where, as often in Provost’s cinema, love becomes a passionate battle in which monsters are finally unmasked.

The unexpected meeting of a shaman, a lonely woman and a young boy whose paths will cross and slip away. After magnifying suffering in Exoticore and Papillon d’amour and revealing wonder in Oh Dear, Nicolas Provost dives into a world of anxiety and strangeness, questioning our fears for the invader and plunging us into the heart of a new emotional experience. Provost, just like his alter ego the shaman, plays tricks, working once again on the cinematographic matter and the sensorial shock it engenders, but also on its illusionary nature like white magic, manipulating time and narrative logic, finally leaving us alone with his latest creation’s unfathomable mystery.

A lonely girl is approached by a shy boy on a moonlight balcony. Their longing is hampered by the mysteries of love in a burning night.‘The Diver’ is a neo-romantic audiovisual painting. It is a poem that combines the quest of the artist for the mysterious elements that create pathos in sound and image, as much as it is a melodramatic experience reaching for the viewer ‘s subconscious cinematic and emotional memory.

A story about an immigrant from Burkina Faso and his attempts to integrate in Norwegian society. Exoticore is a touching tale about modern-day people trying to find their place in this world. A film about being a foreigner, about solitude and contemporary insanity. A dark journey into exoticism. Support:The Flemish Audiovisual Fund and VICTORIA, www.victoria.be Special Jury Award Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Sweden

Bataille is based on the same process as ‘Papillon d’amour’. Here, a scene in which two samurai lock on to each other to win a woman’s heart, turns into a cosmic field of insects and monsters where horror and pain evoke beauty and joy. The ultimate pain, the unbearable joy. With Papillon d’Amour and Bataille, Nicolas Provost joins the devotees. He makes use of original material with the images mirrored in the longitudinal axis, which yields a sequence of new, associative images. The characters are transformed into new life forms with miraculous capabilities that defy the laws of gravitation. At the same time, Provost keeps the viewer (who is, or is not, familiar with the original film and ‘the’ story) on a string. The viewer’s impulse to interpret the new representation as a story is encouraged by the subtle preservation of residues of Kurosawa’s narrative. A powerful, evocative, supporting sound and music track ensures that all this comes across even better. Bataille represents a collision between extremely violent male forms, pitching into each other as mythical monsters. These figures have the ability to constantly transform and adjust themselves. Sometimes they seem to be fighting against themselves, as Siamese twins, but at other times the stronger of the two is chasing the weaker one all the way to the backside of the screen. It takes a whole lot of hacking away until all this bizarre life gives up the ghost.

By subjecting fragments from the film ‘Rashomon’ by Akira Kurosawa to the mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinating scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities and wounded act of dissappearance. Papillon d’Amour is centred on a female form that performs a ritual, being watched by a male counterpart. Spiralling and screaming, it undergoes a catharsis (or is it self-imposed chastisement?) which culminates in complete disappearance.