Ephrem Koering has enjoyed a week of the best cinema in Iraq, competing in the twelfth edition of the Duhok International Film Festival with his debut film FINIR AU SOLEIL.

The screening was extraordinary and the opportunity to meet other filmmakers was priceless.

This festival has been hugely successful and is becoming an unmissable film event on the international Asian film festival circuit.

FINIR AU SOLEIL premiered worldwide at the Tirana International Film Festival in Albania, a qualifying event for the Hollywood Oscars and the EFA European Film Awards.

Since then, he has participated in some of the most exciting festivals in the world. In Europe, Asia and America.

FINIR AU SOLEIL stars Emilie de Preissac and Robin Maisonneuve, who give outstanding performances in this intense European drama.

Director’s statement:

At the age of eight, I had my first significant experience of abandonment, when, locked alone in a car, I was waiting for my mother who was returning from an appointment.
The world around me was then tinged with a dark veil and the daily setting that surrounded me became the scene of my greatest fears.
Hours had passed in my head when in reality only about ten minutes had passed until she returned.
It is in this bath of sensations and memories of childhood that I wanted to delve back into with “End up in the Sun” in order to reveal an underlying family malaise.
By digging into the subject, I realized that this feeling of abandonment was also strongly found in families where the parents had the most difficulty continuing to occupy their role. Through Louis’ eyes, the film aims to paint a portrait of his mother, Dolores, who is experiencing a real breakdown and no longer finds the strength to continue her role as a single mother.
More and more studies and testimonies focus on “maternal regret” and parental burnout, a real social reality around which people are increasingly speaking out.
Around my friends my age or my brothers and sisters who are becoming young parents, I was touched to see the same doubts and loss of bearings, as well as the difficulty of talking about it in public.
Any parent may have dreamed at some point of being able to run away and change their life, or take refuge in a faraway hotel to escape their daily life.
The fear of being a “bad mother” and the injunctions that go with it can then lead to a state of extreme mental and physical exhaustion, especially when you are alone or not heard, to the point of withdrawing into yourself completely.
This is the path that Dolores experiences and that Louis witnesses at the time of the film. She is not crazy, but believes she is because she finds herself overwhelmed by her own emotions that she can no longer manage.
The goal of the film is not to judge Dolores’ behavior, but on the contrary to reveal her feeling of distress and its repercussions on the family unit.
At first disturbing and dangerous, Louis ends up glimpsing his mother’s weaknesses behind her mask and her heavy silences. The framing consists mainly in fixed and sharp shots of the characters to highlight the hardness and the distance that separates them. Some subjective shots are included to get as close as possible to Louis’ point of view.
I therefore chose to design the film at child level to show the effects that this situation has on him.
Despite his efforts, Louis never manages to really read what is going on in his mother’s head. The fear of abandonment seeps into his imagination and makes the outside world even more worrying. He cannot completely understand the opaque world of adults that presents itself to him and so he gives the signs that he sees the meaning of his own fears.

Stay tuned. In a few days, we will announce new successes for this wonderful French production.

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