As often in French artists Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’s projects, the origin of the film Un passage d’eau is based on scientific grounds. Employing a methodology that reflects their doctoral education in the humanities and literature, Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’ scenarios establish consistency between speculation around mythologies, proposed solutions to impasses of science, and surveys around a field to study, making their films rather stages of exploration than a plausible answer.

Indeed, science is discussed in their work as a knowledge which forever renews the realities as well as fantasies. Their films are so, somehow, research laboratories, made ​​of different layers and stages of proof of computation more or less likely, also echoing to the history of cinema. Playing with genres, from science fiction to epic, from TV reconstitution to anthropological documentary. Using experimental filming methods, as seen in Werner Herzog’s movies, or forms and frames, reminding particular Eric Rohmer’s visual language, the filmmakers offer a quite contemporary vision on the history of myths.

Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’s first entirely written scenario, Un passage d’eau unfolds his story at the crossroads of history and knowledge. By staging their cinematic and philosophical potential, the film offers a contemporary and poetic vue on a history of aquatic fantasy. It is built around three narratives, in different places and times, in which actions are alternately held. This triptych aims to uncover and document the imagination of the water as objects and bodies’ conservation source.
Some marine creatures, such as lobster, may be immortal. In the future, Man would he be able to mutate instead of getting old?

Assumptions : off a beach resort, amateur archaeologists dive on old shipwrecks sites and try to preserve their underwater discoveries of the ravages of time. In a coastal town, a spa institute offers guests to use sea resources to rejuvenate. In the meanwhile in a former bathhouse, a mysterious group of retirees formed a club whose main purpose is to access to eternal life.

Between archaeological documentary and fantastic tale, between myth and incongruous encounters, from the depths of the sea to the thalassotherapy pools, Un passage d’eau is a fiction blending ​​documentary and fully staged sequences, actual participants and actors. A fantastic end brings together scientific discoveries and fantasized speculations. The film is playing on ellipses and dichotomies guided by these characters. They provide meaning to the story thanks to their characterizations, their encounters, and their recurrences in different narrative frames. In the manner of symbolic figures from ancient mythology (such as nymphs, cyclops or sirens...), they justify the tracks taken from the theoretical and iconographic collection of the authors as well as the assumed fantasy they establish within the synopsis of the film.