OISEAUX DES ÎLES

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A couple traverses the vivid dreams and humdrum daily life of two weeks in quarantine alone together.


When colonizing an island, island birds gradually evolve to the pressures of the landscape.
They adapt, their feathers grow darker, and over time they lose their ability to fly.


A couple,

“She” - Manon Carrié
“He” - Ronan Le Floc’h

Manon Carrié is a French-Filipina-American writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her
interests lie in the nuances of characters, cultures and structural conflicts. Ronan Le Floc'h is a photographer based in Paris. His personal projects document sustainability and obsolescence in modern culture.



Oiseaux Des Îles (Island Birds) is an intimate glimpse into the life of the couple during two
weeks of quarantine. After the announcement of France’s mandatory confinement, the couple
immerses themselves in the whimsical delights of life alone together. Weaving double narration
between the couple’s dreams and mounting incidents of tension, the film follows the faceless
couple as recreation transforms into repetitive routine, and their felicity succumbs to the subtle
discord of isolation and stifling closeness. Dense, dreamlike imagery envelops the lovers,
exposing details of the essential, the obscurity between dreams and reality, and the intrinsic
malaise of confined love.


Carrié 'My partner and I were long-distance for the first nine months of our relationship before the film.
We traveled back and forth every month and a half to see one another, and in March I had
come to France to visit him for two-weeks. A few days after my arrival, president Emmanuel
Macron, announced that France would be closing its borders due to Covid-19. My return flight
was cancelled. In a moment, our relationship altered from long-distance to no-distance. We
settled for two weeks in his family’s beach shack in a secluded area with a camera, notebook
and provisions. It would be fun. Over the course of our time there, we filmed every repetitive
activity. On the side, we kept a small, shared notebook where we wrote our distorted dreams,
grocery lists, and intermittent statuses. What began as amusing rapidly turned into fighting,
tension, stress, and by the final days we had stopped speaking. Yet we continued to film, and
we clung to the solace of connection through creativity and busyness. When it came time to
assemble the film, not yet knowing what story it would tell, we decided to unify our recorded
dreams and happenings with the imagery we had unconsciously shot. It was in the editing
process that we fully realized the association between our subconscious, our sentiments and
the images our bodies compelled us to capture, and that became the driving force to facing and
baring the subtle disquietudes of our confinement.
In effect, Oiseaux Des Îles (Island Birds) is a wandering reflection of love in a low-grade
pressure cooker, a time-capsule dream observation, and an endearing limbo that lies in the grey
space between dysphoria and the joyfully mundane. The unforeseen complications of island
birds when they settle on the island that is meant to salvage them. '

CREDITS