A New Life

An innovative, tactile film about a young American searching for a mysterious and beautiful sex worker in Bulgaria — a story not driven by plot or dialogue, but by visceral images and sounds that burrow under the skin. Philippe Grandrieux’s films are saturated with sound — screams, moans, breath, rasping voices, and most importantly, music: in A New Life, hissing, unintelligible industrial rhythms bleed into sentimental melodies and the deafening pulse of nightclub beats.

Philippe Grandrieux:
“Sound and music hold a special place in my films. The soundscape of A New Life was born early, before any images existed. When Éric Vuillard and I finished the first version of the script, I sent it to the group Etant Donné, and they began recording music before there was even a single frame. We used that recording on set. This sound is a kind of echo of the ‘big bang’ that preceded the creation of the universe — a residue of catastrophe we were never witness to, but whose echo we can still hear.”

 After the film, we’ll brew some tea and share our impressions. The meeting will be led by philosopher and co-founder of the cinema Varya Vlasova.