Title: Our pantheons
Foreign Title: Nos panthéons
Year: 2025
Country: France
Language: In French with English subtitles
Awards:
Director: Rosalie Charrier
“Everything is political. Every choice, every camera angle in my technical cuts, everything means something” – Rosalie Charrier, Director
The French love their Pantheon. It houses the tombs of great men and women of France, but mainly men. According to D. W. O’Boyle, the creator of a world-building Tabletop Role Playing Game (a TTRPG) called “Our Pantheon,” where players act as gods creating a world from nothing, “In this game you play as gods creating a world from nothing. You draw the map, create the inhabitants, and influence their cultures. I say “influence” because the gods and goddesses do not have complete control over mortals.”
Director Rosalie Charrier situates just such a goddess, Fotini Peluso, portraying a nameless archeologist on her knees, hard at work in a “dig”, separated by a flimsy metal fence from a small group of gawking boys and a middle-aged man taunting her, pleading and harassing what they observe as a “fallen angel… an oasis in a f– desert.” Meanwhile, Peluso is working strenuously, digging, writing in a notebook, attempting to ignore a continuous stream of vulgar, aggressive attempts to impress the object of their attention by their swagger, relentlessly egging each other on. Yet Peluso, like any immortal being, is silent throughout, even when a small group of curious international students surround her appreciatively but who are quickly chased off by her (stereotyped) aggressors. Surely, these mortals still know not how to admire or worship the goddess on the other side of this fence of time.
When one of the boys finally tosses a red smoke grenade over the fence, Charrier introduces a David Lynch-style effect of magical realism that, to our surprise, reveals “catcalling” as ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.
