Presented by Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC)

North American premiere
Selection 2024

Pendant ce temps sur Terre

Directed by Jérémy Clapin

Credits  

Official selection

Berlinale 2024

Director

Jérémy Clapin

Producer

Luc Bricault, Marc Du Pontavice

Writer

Jérémy Clapin

Cast

Dimitri Doré, Sam Louwyck, Megan Northam, Sébastien Pouderoux, Catherine Salée

contact

Level Film

France 2024 89 mins OV French Subtitles : English
Genre Thriller

“Propelled by an innate sense of mise en scène, Jérémy Clapin makes the great leap from animation to fiction with an astonishing movie intertwining genres”
– Fabien Lemercier, CINEUROPA

“A moving elegy on the power of grief, and the lengths to which we are driven in order to feel whole”
– Nikki Baughan, SCREEN

“A strange, poetic, and endearingly surreal meditation on the counterintuitive ways in which we react when confronted with loss”
– Damon Wise, DEADLINE

Astronaut Franck Martens has been missing for three years.

Elsa Martens’ older brother Franck had long dreamt of going to space and setting foot on an alien world. His dream came true when he was chosen to be the first human to go into interstellar travel, until he mysteriously disappeared in the vastness of the cosmos. All that remains of him is a statue commemorating the missing local hero and spaceman, in the town square.

Devastated by the loss of her brother, Elsa finds herself a ghost of a person, shambling her way through life, and looking to the stars in the hopes for a sign of her older brother’s return. One fateful night, she receives an unexpected call from Franck. He’s not alone. They have a proposal. A bargain. Five lives, for Franck’s return. She has six days.

PENDANT CE TEMPS SUR TERRE (MEANWHILE ON EARTH), Jérémy Clapin's live-action debut following his Oscar-nominated I LOST MY BODY, is an inversion of science-fiction classics—a slice-of-life tale of existing on Earth while an Extraordinary Man is out there, far beyond the solar system, and the excruciating mundanity of living with the awareness of the scale of everything. Live-action storytelling is intercut with animated sections that take us into the head space connecting the siblings to one another, bringing with it the sensibilities of indie French bédé to the silver screen.

MEANWHILE ON EARTH gently takes the audience through the desperation for the one chance at an impossible hope—a Faustian deal driving Elsa into terrible decisions that will reverberate outwards and affect very real lives, highlighting which type of person she considers to be of less importance. Through this ordeal, a mysterious alien voice goads her on with an ever shrinking deadline...

...in the hopes of a maybe. – Moustafa Chamli