Inside the Ruins

After the death of her father, Selina Weber seeks refuge in Pompei, a city still crossed by phantoms of those struck by the eruption of Vesuvius two thousand years ago. He had filmed her as a child, as a teenager. She had filmed him in the prime of life. In her thoughts, images of their trips surface—brilliant and precious fragments of summers spent together—but also those of the illness, in the cold light of the hospital. Filmed archives and streams of consciousness seem to become one. She gathers slivers of recollection, searching her memories, to keep them with her and find refuge within them. But the present catches up with her. Walking on the ridge of a volcano, drawn by the vision of the abyss as her father had been before her, she does not however surrender to the tragic delight of despair. Open to the living she encounters on her path, she talks with them, questions, thus taking us alongside her into a simultaneously intimate and universal quest for which film is the obvious tool. (Visions du Réel)