Each of Lola Gonzalez’s movie invents the following. All draws an obsession, like an neverstopping dream, night after night, that gain its influence during the day.

The starting point is always the same. Four people, ten, sometimes more, live cloistered away from cities. Impossible to know who they are or what holds them together. Deserters, utopians, brainwashed mercenaries? But it doesn’t really matter after all to understand what their actions prepare. Let’s rather suppose that their only requirement is to learn to live together, to agree intuitively to come as close as possible to a fair coexistence. What matters is the connection. They form a band who opposes and replaces at the same time the rest of the world. The apparent lightness that emerges of the first films has evaporated in favor of a desire more open to the world.

As a ritual, Lola Gonzalez’ movies open on these young people facing outward, toward the landscape. Are they able to see a sign they all interpret the same way? Each time, communication passes through bodies that graze and touch voluntarily.

In the two most recent films, Summer Camp (2015) and Veridis Quo (2016), a quasi-military training accompanied in the first by a hypnotic litany and in the second by a traumatic noisy sea ​​storm. If Summer Camp is a long collective prayer, Veridis Quo looks like the last supper of an enigmatic troupe guided toward a cliff at the size of this common dream.

Whether in writing, production, or the choice to work with her friends, the works of Lola Gonzalez deal with authenticity, spontaneity and fluidity with simple visual forms. From the individual to the collective, they question us about the power of the collective, and its limits too.