Les Sentiers de l’Utopie

2011 - Zones/La Découverte

Both a travel story and a fictional documentary, this book-film offers a real and imaginary journey, an exploration launched to discover post-capitalist forms of life.
For nearly a year, Isa and JJ set out on the roads of Europe, meeting those who have chosen, here and now, to live differently. They shared other ways of loving and eating, of producing and exchanging, of deciding things together and rebelling.

From a “Climate Camp” illegally set up near Heathrow airport to a hamlet squatted by Cevennes punks, an anarchist school run by its own students, an English farming community with a very low ecological impact, occupied factories in Serbia, a collective practicing free love in a former Stasi base or a farm that has abolished private property, they discovered utopias alive in these invisible interstices of the system.

From this experience emerged Les Sentiers de l’Utopie (Paths Through Utopia). The text is a captivating narrative, telling the life of each community, its practices and its history. The film, a docu-drama shot during the journey, is presented as a poetic road-movie set in the future. Characters and places circulate from book to film and, step by step, let us glimpse, in the breach of the present, the glimmers of another possible future.

Les Sentiers de l’Utopie, Zones/La découverte, 2011

Pfade Durch Utopia, Nautilus, 2012

The trailer

The film