Synopsis
“To you, Lionel, I found this drawing of a boy going off to sell an empty camera high up.” We read this sentence on a postcard written by Hervé Couergou to Lionel Soukaz, a card full of poetry and puns (of “I” and evils, they would have written), one of their many love letters. Her lover since 1982, Hervé Couergou would become filmmaker Lionel Soukaz’s companion during the painful early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. They shared their friends, their lovers, their creative work, their despairs and joys, their very lives. When Lionel Soukaz begins filming again, equipped for the first time in 1991 with a video camera, he unwittingly begins a diary that will span 2000 hours over several decades, and in which Hervé, renamed “RV” in the handwritten inventory, will be one of the main characters until his death in 1994. Artistes en zone troublés tells the story of Hervé and Lionel, of this story as a refuge in the storm, and of the poetic genius that accompanies Lionel to this day, that even death does not silence, expressed in the video diary tapes, in their correspondence and on the colorful pages of the diaries.
