Les Passagers : l’Enfant
Directed by Ziad Touma and written by Nicolas Peufaillit
Couzin Films and Les Produits Frais are proud to announce that the interactive VR experience Les Passagers : l’Enfant, third chapter of the Passegers project, directed by Ziad Touma and written by Nicolas Peufaillit, will be presented for its world premiere and as part of the Official Selection of the Tribeca Festival to be held from June 9 to 20, 2021.
The first two chapters Les Passengers: Elle & Lui part of the Virtual Cinema section of the SXSW festival last March, and in the XR competitions of the Festival du Nouveau Cinema (Montreal) and NewImages (Paris). The final chapter La Dame will be launched in the coming months to complete the experiment.
With a cast including Maxim Roy, Sébastien Chassagne, Evelyne Istria and Ethann Bergua-Isidore, Les Passengers is a four-chapter interactive VR experience that tells the story of four people who don’t know each other and travel together in a train car. By following intimate thoughts, remembering memories and experiencing the emotion of the incarnate character, the viewer can influence – with a simple glance, a speech or a hand gesture – the course of the story and its denouement.
L’ENFANT, third chapter of Passengers
At the age of 10, l’ENFANT travels alone for the first time. He will be caught up in the weight of his guilt, convinced that he was at the origin of the recent separation from his parents. At the dawn of her fortieth birthday, ELLE tries to digest the demand that her partner has just made on her. Will she find the courage to answer him? For his part, LUI has just fallen in love with the Passenger sitting in front of him. But it is still necessary to be able to speak to her, in the distorting mirror of a train car, where the importance of the slightest gesture, the slightest glance, is multiplied.
Passengers: interactive fiction
Co-produced by Ziad Touma and Oriane Hurard, the Les Passengers experiment was directed by Ziad Touma and scripted by Nicolas Peufaillit (AProphet, The Revenants), in collaboration with RobertHospyan and Coralie Majouga, based on an original idea by Yako (Jean-Christophe Yacono) and Camille Duvelleroy.
The artistic direction of each chapter offers a distinct animation style to represent the singularity from the point of view of each Passenger. Thus, L’ENFANT sees the adults around him drawn with the strokes of his felt pencils, SHE sees the world in “watercolor”, symbolizing the troubles and doubt that inhabit her, while the vision of LUI is inspired by oil painting, thus embellishing his vision of the world and especially the woman sitting in front of him.
Technical and interactivity
Passengers combines different types of cutting-edge technologies to create a unique and innovative immersive experience. The use of the actors’ motion and facial capture has allowed all the humanity and subtlety of their emotions and reactions to be retained, while being fully responsive to the actions of the viewer.
Their memories are filmed in stereoscopic real-world shots and integrated into the train environment recomposed in real-time 3D. These memories shed light on the intimate story of the character we embody.
