The heart in the clouds
Oh the beautiful days! 2024
Interview with Paolo Giordano and Mathieu Simonet.
Paolo Giordano, the youngest winner of the prestigious Strega Prize for The Solitude of Prime Numbers (an international success translated into over 20 languages), delivers a climatological auto-fiction with Tasmania. The narrator, a disillusioned writer and journalist, flees his marital crisis to take refuge in the climate crisis by getting his newspaper to send him to Paris to cover the climate conference. As the skies darken over his couple, he learns that global warming could cause the clouds to disappear, and that Tasmania would be the best refuge. In a world in crisis, Paolo Giordano delivers a melancholy reflection on existence and the need for everyone to find their Tasmania, where the future is possible.
Mathieu Simonet’s La Fin des nuages is both the chronicle of a bereaved love affair and a poetic-legal manifesto for the protection of clouds. He pays tribute to Benoît, his late husband, and wonders whether his last breath, through a butterfly effect, could have triggered the storm. He questions cloud seeding, which allows states to chemically manipulate clouds to provoke rain or destabilize an enemy country by causing drought and flooding. Mathieu Simonet sounds the alarm on the ecological and geopolitical risks of this practice, as well as on the high poetic value of clouds.
Seized by upheavals that are both intimate and collective, Paolo Giordano and Mathieu Simonet both take us on a journey that combines fear and wonder.
Co-produced with Mucem.
To read
Paolo Giordano,Tasmania, Prix André Malraux 2023, Le Bruit du monde, 2023.
Mathieu Simonet, La Fin des nuages, Julliard, 2024.
Interview with Paolo Giordano and Mathieu Simonet.
Paolo Giordano, the youngest winner of the prestigious Strega Prize for The Solitude of Prime Numbers (an international success translated into over 20 languages), delivers a climatological auto-fiction with Tasmania. The narrator, a disillusioned writer and journalist, flees his marital crisis to take refuge in the climate crisis by getting his newspaper to send him to Paris to cover the climate conference. As the skies darken over his couple, he learns that global warming could cause the clouds to disappear, and that Tasmania would be the best refuge. In a world in crisis, Paolo Giordano delivers a melancholy reflection on existence and the need for everyone to find their Tasmania, where the future is possible.
Mathieu Simonet’s La Fin des nuages is both the chronicle of a bereaved love affair and a poetic-legal manifesto for the protection of clouds. He pays tribute to Benoît, his late husband, and wonders whether his last breath, through a butterfly effect, could have triggered the storm. He questions cloud seeding, which allows states to chemically manipulate clouds to provoke rain or destabilize an enemy country by causing drought and flooding. Mathieu Simonet sounds the alarm on the ecological and geopolitical risks of this practice, as well as on the high poetic value of clouds.
Seized by upheavals that are both intimate and collective, Paolo Giordano and Mathieu Simonet both take us on a journey that combines fear and wonder.
Co-produced with Mucem.