3 - 9 NOVEMBER, 2025
Chasing Whales
Director:
La Fille Renne
Runtime:
00:05:26
Country:
France
Genre:
Documentary
FILM SYNOPSIS
“Travels after travels, in endless expanses of ocean and preserved nature, cetaceans set the tempo for my weeks one way or another: dead or alive, skeleton or cut-up flesh, archaeological artefact or decoration, hunted or stranded.”
After coming across cetaceans or their artefacts in Norway, in Lofoten, and Orkney, filmmaker La Fille Renne decided to take their camera to the Faroes and the Hebrides.
From magnificent landscapes to whaling stations’ ruins and whale skeletons, their research caused them to face past and current relationships between humans and those sea mammals.
They question the fragility of our links to those giants, the current whaling practices inherited from subsistence behaviour, the human impact on marine ecosystems, and the future.
DIRECTOR SYNOPSIS
La Fille Renne is a non-binary filmmaker, photographer, and tattoo artist from Lyon. Trained in ecology and zooarchaeology, their work explores queerness and sexuality, as well as human–animal relationships in polar and northern coastal cultures. They are passionate about analog photography, ecology, osteology, the Arctic and intimacy.
Their short films, made solo or in a collective with Laure Giappiconi and Elisa Monteil, have been screened at numerous festivals around the world, including Sundance, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Norwegian Short Film Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, Go Short, Les Filministes, RIDM, Leiden Shorts, Côté Court, Lago Film Fest, etc.
CAST & CREW
Director, Writer, Producer, Photographer, Editor : La Fille Renne
Sound Creation , Voice-Over, Sound Editing : Elisa Monteil
Sound Mix : Raphaël Mouterde
Translation : Swann Agnelli