Maurin Dietrich: Vidourle is set in a small town in southern France, where the narrative follows a bizarre sequence of bullfights in an freezing river. But the animals are absent, what we see are only young men, boys, shivering in the stream. Skinny-limbed tension in their bodies, they are waiting for something to happen. But the event is always out of sight and the main actors, the animals, never really appear. When the boredom of waiting overcomes the boys, they provoke the animals with gestures. While the boys do not even gratify viewers with a glance, their tension in standing still and waiting, resembles a performance. 
How did you arrive at this setting? Can you also tell us more about your process of filming?

Yalda Afsah: Vidourle results from my research into local traditions of bullfights in the south of France. I had already shot my film Tourneur in that region and I found it very exciting that this river, called Vidourle, was chosen as a main setting for this specific type of bullfight. It quickly became clear to me that I wanted to focus my attention on the young people present at the end and that I would keep the bulls outside my framing. This separation, which the montage creates between animal and human, allows viewers to look at the teenagers' behaviour without seeing the bull as an antagonist. I am interested in such formal means that leave viewers in the dark, while also giving them the opportunity to develop a different view and perspective as well as to make their own associations. Moreover, I found this state—between boredom, waiting, and the euphoria that briefly comes up once in a while, of wanting to assert oneself and at the same time being afraid—emblematic of the state of the teenager: a certain state of limbo, not knowing what is yet to come. A state that, interestingly, also seems to apply to our current situation in the pandemic.

MD: This state of uncertainty and limbo that those bodies are embedded in Vidourle resonates with the ongoing pandemic also on broader context, since your work looks at the often broken relationship between animals and humans. Zoonotic diseases like Covid-19 are emerging with unprecedented frequency. Whether we’re speaking of SARS, Ebola or Swine Flu, it all has to do with broken balances between humans and animals, generally caused by the latter being intensively hunted, bred, or traded. It’s a global scenario with an animal as its central actor and the human population as bystanders. Maybe a bit similar to that of the boys in Vidourle, who find themselves as passive bystanders to their animal protagonists.
Can you talk a bit more about this relation between human and animal and how they take the stage in your work?

YA: I decided that Vidourle’s main protagonists, the animals, would not appear in the film, as to direct the focus entirely to the human participants. In this way, the sidelines turn into the main stage and the behaviour of the young people can be perceived more intensely.

In general, my work deals with the strongly ambivalent behaviour of humans towards animals—the often unclear and blurred boundaries between care, attention and identification with animals, on the one hand, and discipline, submission and human dominance, on the other hand. I find it exciting to observe the behaviour of the human protagonists in order to question what it ultimately says about us and our relationship to other-than-human beings—which is revealed in the handling and domestication of animals, or even in the desire to compete with them.

Similarly, I raise questions about the naturalness of human control and the artificiality that this power over animals represents, for example in the case of dressage. I am particularly interested in forms of exercising power and control, the motivation behind them and how the relationship between the human and animal agents is defined.

MD: Besides the visual narration in your work, you have a distinctive approach to sound which, in a way, questions the naturalness and construction of realities. How do relate to sound in your films?

YA: Sound plays an essential role in my films. In Vidourle, the sound was created entirely in post-production. I hardly used any original sounds in it. Basically, I am interested in removing the original sound level from the initial documentary setting of my films, in order to create a narrative of my own. I work a lot with disassociation. For example, you hear the water unnaturally loudly, it sounds closer than it actually appears in the image. Through sound, I try to condense the selected frame and purposefully direct the viewers’ gaze. However, I also often use sounds that seem somewhat artificial, as a further means to emphasise the artificial character of the situation itself.