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For a long time, I had no photos of my childhood.
We were not allowed to take pictures in the community.
Chris always said that we should remember things our own way,
not necessarily the way they happened.
Memory isn't the truth,
especially when everybody lies to you.
After my father died,
I found a tape inside his camcorder.
When I asked my mom about it,
she said she never knew about it.
I sensed she was hiding something.
I spent a lot of time watching this empty footage.
It seemed meaningless.
I never imagined that it would be the key to my father's secret.
I wanted to include these images at the start of a film telling our story.
They were the only things that I knew were real.
BETWEEN REALITY AND FICTION
For years, I couldn't make that film.
And then, one day, I received a package from Tokyo.
My dear Jean,
I regret to inform you that our Master Chris passed away.
He left me some fragments of our story.
I'm handing them over to you.
Since you are a musician,
I hope you will be able to find our melody.
It’s time you learn the truth about Dad.
Farewell.
Your sister, Anne.
When she sent me our archives,
I hadn't any news from her in 15 years.
They were all of our therapy sessions,
We are all around you, François.
Your children are here,
they are listening.
Take your time.
Breath in.
Breath out.
Close your eyes
and listen to the music.
Look at the images.
Visualize this path to the Light.
I ask you to stay with us.
Truthfully.
Free yourself from fear.
Tell us about this road, François.
Where does it lead you?
As far as I can remember,
there was this road
and this music.
I had nightmares about it all my life.
I think that's my first memory:
my six brothers and sisters and me with my parents
in the car
on the way to the community.
Chris had kept the photos,
but most of his music was missing.
There was only this tape.
The first melody I ever heard in my life.
In the pictures, I feel like I don't recognize anyone.
Only the places,
certain moments
One could call it a summer camp.
We were so many children; entire families
living like a tribe up there.
I know this is me.
This is Anne.
She was like a mother to me.
One day, she took my other sister Charlotte and me
and told us a secret:
"Dad is not what you think he is."
She was hospitalized at a young age.
I asked my parents if she was sick.
They explained to me that she was having nightmares, but not in her sleep.
My parents were looking for help.
That's how they met Chris, at the church.
He spent years in a seminary, so they trusted him.
He said he also studied psychiatry in California.
He had a theory based on a book.
He said, Anne was not sick;
she was just a symptom of something deeper in the family.
And that there was a reality hidden behind delirium.
Chris introduced himself as an artist.
He experimented with video and dream imagery.
His wife, Elina, was a singer.
They met in Bulgaria.
They had traveled around Asia together in the 70s
to record their psychedelic music.
Chris would always repeat "you're not sick. I'm not a doctor.
We're just painting your psyche."
He took this picture of us in 1983,
in front of his house in the mountains.
I'm the youngest,
holding Anne's hand.
We look like the perfect Catholic family, in this photo.
But everything changed after that summer.
We started going there for group sessions,
each time for a few weeks.
I'll never forget this place.
We had to listen to these tapes almost all day
with this repetitive music
I remember every note.
We were put into a succumbed state
to be "freed", like Chris used to say.
You were once Darkness.
Within the Lord, you have now become Light.
Let's live as the children of Light,
as Light produces everything that is Goodness, Justice and Truth.
Things started to go wrong right after the first session.
We went on vacation to the beach, like every summer.
And one day,
Even though I was too young to know how to swim,
I walked straight into the sea.
Think of the sun, Jean.
Imagine you are dazzled as if you were looking at the sun.
Jean,
I would like for us to talk about what happened during vacation.
I almost drowned...
Can you tell me why?
I wanted to go under the sea.
What does it look like, under the sea, Jean?
There are noises.
What kind of noises?
Like the music.
Like my music?
Yes.
Is there something you can see under the water?
It’s a secret.
Does that secret scare you?
No.
Can you tell me what you see under the water?
I don’t know.
It's beautiful.
Are your brothers and sisters with you under the water?
No.
There's just Dad.
For years, I traveled the world to play my own music.
It was time for me to know where it came from.
I decided to follow Chris and Elina's tracks.
June 4, 1976.
I took the last ferry from Niigata, just before the typhoon.
In Japan, the time you spend dreaming is not lost time.
The island workers sleep like children mastered in natural disasters.
I would like to visit their dreams.
With their eyes shut, they sail away in their inner realities.
SADO ISLAND
Sado was Chris' first and last destination.
I went to visit his grave in the heights of the island.
There were two kanji carved into the stone:
"Shin Sekai."
New World.
Brautigan told me a lot about Kodo.
He thought their music was a bridge to the new world.
When I met Kodo,
I told them about the tape that I had
and my idea to remake Chris and Elina's music entirely,
Kodo has no true hierarchy.
They make collegial decisions.
So I had to explain not only to the ones who had known Chris,
but also to the younger ones who probably thought I was insane.
They ended up saying, "Well, if you're crazy enough
to travel 10,000 miles just to meet us with nothing guaranteed,
then of course we'll do it."
We practice
to try to get into a state of trance.
Sometimes you get close to it,
just by playing the Teiko drums for a long time.
You begin to feel physically exhausted
to the point of a whiteout.
I recall the Memento Mori that Master Sawaki taught me,
back at the Eihei-ji Temple.
To practice Zen is like putting one foot in the grave,
it’s practicing the awakening,
the trance, the Satori.
It’s exactly the discernment described by St. Ignatius.
KODO
And there it was, that sound,
The sound of the world I was looking for under the water.
Chris used to play it in between each session
to open and close the inner doors
The doors to other places in space and time.
Back on that beach where I drowned
30 years prior,
I dared to ask my mom for the first time about what happened.
I stayed in the community…
And that’s when they separated us, Dad and I.
And very soon I became crazy.
And he made me talk, he made me tell him lots of things.
It was like role play,
but based on St. Ignatius' spiritual exercises.
They would read them to us… I became that part
as if I was Jesus Christ…
The delirium,
it’s hard to explain,
that’s why…
I didn’t really know what I was saying.
My mother didn't remember,
but I had her tapes.
If the soul is weak,
the Angle of Darkness will enter peacefully
and silently
like in his own home,
where the door is open to him.
Irène,
how do you feel?
Tired.
Why aren't you sleeping?
I'm looking for her.
Who are you talking about?
The neighbors called the police.
They told them, she had entered our home.
Who?
And you saw this person?
She doesn't have a face.
She's here.
She is ugly.
And François?
He is with you?
Yes, he's with me, but...
he's not here.
She comes to see him.
He says her name in his sleep.
Tell me her name.
I think he said...
Melody.
I asked my friends to help me play this score
as I was remembering it.
October 3, 1990.
François keeps disappearing,
sometimes for several days.
He stays completely silent during the sessions
I proposed something to him:
if he cannot say it
then maybe he can show me?
My father always suffered from melancholia,
but it got worse after we started the sessions.
He would go through phases when he would stop talking and disappear for days.
My mom was terrified that he would never return
And a month later, I suddenly stopped sleeping all together.
Dad was… was no longer well, either.
While I was delirious, I was no longer with him.
Well, maybe it was to protect him or...
pfff.
There was a side to Dad that was very bright...
and then at the same time,
a monstrous distress.
In 1992, we moved there permanently.
The community had expended a lot.
We were all shocked when we saw the buildings.
The beautiful nature of our childhood had disappeared.
Everything was cold.
Brutal.
Organized.
Chris became obsessed with us.
He wanted to document every memory,
every nightmare, every hallucination in the family.
He thought it was a revelation of something to come.
Architecture:
it’s a necessary incarnation of thought.
By inaugurating this place,
we are laying the foundational stone of a new humanity.
Our children will be the first generation.
Chris and Elina had a son.
Ivan used to be my best friend.
In the 90s, we all lived together in the community.
A bit after Chris died,
he called me out of the blue and said he was in town
and needed a place to crash.
Paris was such a foreign place for him.
He told me he could never adjust to city life.
He asked me for a moment before we listened to the tapes.
He hadn't heard his mother's voice in 20 years.
Elina,
listen to the music.
Let it inspire you.
It’s been a while since you spoke.
I would like for you to tell us how you feel.
I sense a lot of anger these last few days.
It's always in me, the church.
I miss the valley.
Everything was so beautiful.
We're all living together.
Our children were playing in the snow with the dog
and now even that fucking dog bites.
I'm scared.
What changed?
They built the dam.
And you've become like them.
You and your ugly buildings. I hate them.
Is this the future you want?
For us? For our child?
Everything is dying.
I want to go back.
It was so nice to walk there.
I used to walk and sing and everything was perfect.
That's where I wrote my song for Melody.
Thank you, Elina.
Thank you, my love for being exactly who you are.
There can be no rebirth without destruction.
We drank a lot that night.
Ivan had way too many.
I told him to stop, but he told me not to worry:
"It's in my blood."
His mother used to be a drug addict.
Chris had gotten her clean in the early 80s,
and she got better for some time.
But then she lost faith.
I tried to interrogate Ivan about this song for Melody.
Could Melody be a person?
He said he didn't remember.
Everything died the day his mother jumped off the dam.
NAGASAKI
I remember hearing Elina's voice like in a dream,
as I was walking the streets of Nagasaki.
That's where Chris had his big revelation in 1975.
In the direction of the Battleship Island:
Gunkanjima.
Here, I’m going to meditate
exactly between the two poles of the cynicism of our civilization
the ruins of our own time.
Between the city of the bomb and the mines of Mistsubishi
where more than 5000 people had to leave the place in disaster in '74.
Here are the last images I took of my father.
On that day, he took us to visit the ruins of the war again.
He had known the horror.
They hid in the basement during the bombings when he was a kid.
His own father was a pilot,
was killed in the first days of the war.
Later in Algeria,
my dad got caught in an attack,
and all of his company was killed.
He had to finish one of his best friends with a shotgun,
to spare him the suffering.
He told me this story as we walked on the shore.
We all knew that he had a few weeks to live
and that it could be the last time he saw the sea.
My brother took my dad's camera and turned it on him for once.
My father died three weeks later.
On the evening of his passing, I filmed the moon.
I wanted a trace to remember that moment,
I thought that maybe a part of me would also appear in this image,
just like my father revealed a part of himself in his.
So I filmed the next day
and the next day
and so on,
just like him.
I kept staring at this footage
to try understand what he was doing.
He just seemed lost.
But then I heard something.
It was him.
Whistling.
I didn't have recordings of his voice,
but then I had this melody.
It reminded me of something.
All of our childhood was there, drowned.
Ivan told me there was no life under the surface.
This water was unbreathable.
Ivan liked that these mountains were like a lock, keeping him from the outside world.
He was 17 when the community was dismantled,
and he decided to stay.
While walking with him,
I couldn't help but to envy his relationship with nature.
I said I should take shelter here when everything collapses.
He laughed at me and said,
"There's no future here."
Just the same old world, dying.
He let me stay for the night.
He lived among what was left of the old community.
He told me to stay away from the others.
These last remaining members were reclusive
The last morning, I took the gondola lift.
I had to go higher to find the flowers of him childhood.
Ivan had warned me that this wilderness was an illusion,
that there were of Wi-Fi signals even at this altitude.
I thought of Chris's utopia,
his love for the poetry of his friend Richard Brautigan,
who predicted the coming of a world where man and machine would be reconciled.
Brautigan was a schizophrenic.
He ended up taking his own life in 1984.
But Chris always considered his writings as visionary.
When Richard died, Chris simply wrote,
"Behind every madman may lie a prophet."
Chris was trying to build a vision for a post-human planet.
He kept saying, "The apocalypse is not what people think it is.
It's not only a question of destruction.
Apocalypse means revelation."
April 1st, '71.
INDONESIA
All the sound of nature give us language.
All things in nature give us form as a human being.
What better sound is there?
Every bird knows a song.
Every monkey knows a song. Every snake knows a song.
And you and I, we have a song right here. On this planet.
March 14, 1971.
We became friends with a young man named Suwentra.
We started by imitating the sounds of nature.
The sounds of water drops,
sometimes the rubbing of objects together.
Sometimes the water flowing through the bamboo tubes.
Everybody in the village plays the Jegog.
Concerts happen during harvest season.
It's like a competition between the villagers
and the goal is to shatter the ground, to help the rice grow again,
to make the loudest noise possible.
The power of the Jegog is very healing for people.
The vibration of the Jegog is strongly felt in the body.
People can bathe in these vibrations.
We are all vibrational beings.
Energy shifts. but lives on forever in various forms.
That night, the sound reminded me of a specific image:
a creature under the sea
who visited me in my childhood nightmares.
She was looking for my dad.
Far from home,
the line between dreams and reality was starting to blur.
Bali must have been completely different in the '70s,
when Chris and Elina came for the first time.
I had to go further and further into the jungle to escape the big city's noise.
I was searching for the sounds of the Kecack.
I knew it had been a turning point in Chris' life.
The suffering was there, in me as well as in them,
I could no longer refuse it or run away from it.
I don't know if it was the palm wine
or the exhausting trance that took hold of me for hours,
but that night I had a clear vision of my inner demon.
Every man has a demon,
every demon has a song.
As I spent my last days living among these families,
it made me reflect on mine.
Like them, we lived as a community for years,
but our relationships were toxic.
Each one of us was trapped in his or her own darkness.
When I filmed these beautiful smiles and this joy,
I began to understand that this was Chris' dream.
He wanted us to be like that.
Everyone needs a utopia.
Here is mine.
The beautiful, young girl with a straw hat
is Laurène, the daughter of my sister, Charlotte.
On the day she was born,
I felt the closest thing I can imagine to having a child.
This is a happy moment.
Laurène is going to have a younger sister.
They're my chosen family today.
Charlotte always had the courage to stand up against Chris.
She never believed in him.
She said she would create her own new world far away from him.
One day, she did something that made us break ties with the community.
That's when all of us left, except for Anne.
I arrived here Monday night, November 30, 1998, at about 9:00 PM.
I’m writing in front of the window.
I can see and hear the sights I’ve always been afraid of.
I was afraid of the big buildings, the park where the patients walk,
and the birds that sing even when it is grey.
Chris tells me that I am normal.
I tell him that, of course, I'm normal,
except that I wanted to open the window
and throw myself out, last Monday.
I had filmed Charlotte in Paris when she was pregnant with Laurène.
That day, she asked me to be her godfather.
She said, "Let's put all this darkness behind."
We started a new life outside of the community
Laurène grew up just like a regular child.
But she couldn't escape that easily.
Around the time when I shot these pictures,
Laurène, had a toy that got infiltrated with water.
She started seeing things in the stain.
First bacteria, then worms.
Then she didn't want to sleep in the same room as the toy.
She said these were creatures from another world.
She started going in and out of the hospital from the age of 12.
We, the elders, are immature.
Our children will invent their own wisdom.
They will be the life, the creators of worlds.
Let us remember Oppenheimer's thoughts
moments after the first bomb in Hiroshima.
You know the world would not be the same.
Few people... laughed.
Few people cried.
Most people were silent.
Every member and line from the Hindy scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu.
Is trying to persuade the prince that
He should do his duty.
And, to impress him...
takes on his multi-armed form...
and says "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
I had a nightmare on the plane
where I was stuck in the old world.
In the dream, I could still hear Elina's melody.
For Chris, this music could summon destruction and rebirth.
For me, it was something else.
SOFIA
These women live up to their name,
the mystery of the Bulgarian voices.
Their vocal harmonies are like Bulgaria:
exactly in between Oriental and Occidental traditions.
That's why it sounds like music from another world to a Westerner.
We worked for months with Professor Dora,
the tough but charismatic choir director.
After days discussing every detail
to get closer to Elina's "Song for Melody,"
it all came together.
Ivan didn't understand my obsession with the past.
We had two days of walk ahead of us.
He had not returned since Elina's death.
The campfire reminded me of our childhood.
I tried to bring back memories, but Ivan stopped me:
"it's your pilgrimage, not mine."
The whole community fell apart when Elina killed herself.
Nobody but Anne trusted Chris anymore.
It was surreal to be there.
I played with my brothers and sisters in this yard.
I didn't remember the details.
All that was left was the fear.
I came back to Paris with a treasure.
I felt like a digital archaeologist
trying to unveil an old virtual ghost.
We need images without lies.
With these new electronic tools,
I am only returning them to their true nature.
Here is the aura of another reality
in which only madmen can find their way.
They inform us about our dark side.
So, I fed my own images through the patch
searching for secrets in this electronic mausoleum
where Chris used to spend most of his time.
It is here
that the meaning of this sentence of Rilke appeared to me fully.
Perhaps all the dragons of our life are princesses
who wait only for the moment to see us one day beautiful and courageous.
Perhaps all the things that frighten us are, deep down,
things left without help that are waiting for us to rescue them.
With his material,
there was one tape labeled "Song for the Dragon."
I remember Suwentra telling me about these faces
resembling dragons, carved in their instruments.
He wanted to compose music,
to make them dance,
to help people harmonize with their demons.
I had heard this exact same song before,
with my dad, 30 years ago.
It started raining right when we were done with the recordings.
I finally asked Kodo if the legend was true,
if they had brought the storm with their drums.
It's probably pure chance.
But sometimes we wonder, when we play the drums outside
and it suddenly starts to rain:
has the weather changed
because our drums have created fluctuations in the atmosphere?
Or is it proof of the powers of God or nature?
I feel an immense power in these moments,
it is so natural and extraordinary at the same time.
In the past,
drums were traditionally used to thank God
or ask him for rain or a bountiful harvest.
A sound that can rip up the sky,
like lightning in clear blue skies.
Like Anne always said.
Her visions were like a lightning strike in clear blue skies.
On this day, Chris was waiting for Anne at the airport.
Their flight to Tokyo was leaving at 5:00 pm,
She wanted to say goodbye.
I knew I would never see her again,
so I rushed to capture those images of her.
As I watch them today,
I wish I could have told her how much I love her
and that I always believed in her.
To me, she was not crazy,
but she never made sense.
I was just a kid, afraid of the things she said.
This different state of consciousness, could you try to describe it to me?
You can never predict.
It's like lightning
in a cloudless sky.
But right now, how do you feel?
It's weird to hear music.
Why don't you listen to music in Paris?
No, I'm not allowed to. The parents don't want it anymore.
They say it could trigger my attacks.
No, but I don't want you to call them attacks.
Explain to me what happened, simply, without judgment.
It's like he's watching me.
I called it the eye of the apocalypse.
The eye of the apocalypse. An eye in the sky?
But it's not music,
that was what it meant.
Only I know what it means.
Only me.
I tried to explain to Jean, but he is too young to understand.
I don't want to talk to him about it.
And what do you think this look is?
It’s a character in my head.
But it does mean something. It's not nothing.
There isn't only one reality.
The eye sees that.
Music is a door.
The music seemed to be the key.
I could hear it playing in the background of her session.
I had to remake it.
I spent days and nights on my machines
like it was an interface that would help me reach Anne in the other world
Somehow, I was hoping for her to answer.
But I only had her sessions.
They were like a puzzle that I had to put back together.
We had a record at home that Dad used to listen to all the time.
There's an eye on it, and I couldn't get it out of my head afterwards.
I called it the eye of the apocalypse.
The eye of the apocalypse. An eye in the sky?
I still have my dad's collection.
It had to be this one.
He wouldn't stop listening to it.
I would reread the lyrics like they were a code
that he left us to understand him.
Until I realized what Anne really meant,
That was what it meant. Only me.
It's not the music. That's what it means.
I had been wrong all along.
It was not in the music. It was everything but the music.
I didn't sleep that night.
I wrote to the address on the package that she had sent me.
I knew she didn't want me to contact her,
but I told her I was coming to Tokyo.
There was a young woman waiting for me at Haneda Airport.
She introduced herself as Miho.
Your sister no longer wishes to see you.
She sends her apologies.
She has been very busy since Master Chris' death.
I asked her to have the privilege of meeting you.
They have told us about you and your family for so many years.
I have been thinking a lot about your father, about his mystery.
May 1, 2014.
Anne has reached the Satori.
TOKYO
She will now be the Awakened One.
At the dawn of my death,
I trust this legacy, and that of her generation.
She will live in the new world.
I had nothing better to do than to follow her in the streets of Tokyo.
She took me to her favorite place.
It was called Shinsuke.
Miho is at home in this world of screens,
a world of multiple identities and realities.
I spent time observing her in these noisy arcades
where she seems completely absorbed out of our world,
navigating freely from one avatar to the other, one dream to the other.
Is it the Satori, the mental state that Chris mentioned all the time?
Could there be a virtual Satori that would look like this?
I asked her what she had seen or heard in these tapes.
I don't understand French or English.
For me, these voices are music.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses
just waiting to see us beautiful and brave one day.
I used to dread the big buildings, the park where
the patients walk and the birds that sing even when it is grey.
Those on whom another sun rises will be the awakened ones.
In your father's story, I saw war, I saw sadness,
but I also saw something else, something very beautiful.
He hid it from you because he was afraid.
Do you understand? I will show you.
Your father was much more than you think.
Your sister Anne was the first to understand.
I think you all understood it and it scared you.
I hear him in the other world, in his other identity.
I hear her singing.
I hear Melody.
Since the beginning, I had been wondering about my dad's secret.
He seemed to be haunted by a woman named Melody.
It had never occurred to me before that they could have been the same person.
Melody was my dad.
Then it came back to me,
I had images of him singing,
already eaten by cancer,
beat down,
but he was smiling like he never had before.
Anne was not crazy.
She had access to my dad's secret.
She knew where he was going on this road.
Your father would take the car,
drive as far as he could,
become Melody,
and then throw away the keys.
It was a challenge to himself.
If one day he didn't find them, he would have to stay in the other world.
I cried when I heard this story.
I guess the little boy in me was scared.
In retrospect that he could have left us.
But he always found the key and the way back.
Today is the day that everything will change.
All these people have come to attend.
Miho told me to meet her at the Mori Tower.
I tried to say no.
I told her I was afraid of heights.
She said today's not a day to be afraid.
There are few times in life when you meet a true philosophical question.
Am I betraying my dad by telling his secrets in my film?
It took me years to gather the courage to answer no.
The world where he was ashamed,
where people were stuck in their old fears and bigotries,
judged him for what he was.
This world is dying and it should be.
I can't use modern terminology either.
Transgender, cross-dressing, non binary.
He knew nothing of these terms when he built his identity in the 30s and 40s.
We cannot bring him back now and ask him what he identifies as.
This will remain his secret.
I just know that I loved him as my father.
And now I love her as Melodie.
It was important that you came here with me.
Today is the birth of the second sun.
Finally, I can visit Miho's dream.
She taught me how.
I've learned how to read the signs now.
My journey is done.
Now the two worlds are reconciled.
The secret will not hurt anymore.
You and your family can live.
I hear Melody in this stream.
TODAY
Laurène's little sister grew up so fast.
Laurène, herself, grew up faster than I thought.
I composed this song for you, Laurène,
and for this child that you're bringing to our planet.
You are the children of the future.
You told me not to ask if it was a boy or girl.
She or he shall be free in this new world.