Carte Blanche 30 years of Étrange - Stéphan Castang
With Vincent Must Die, his thrilling and impressive first film, hailed by critics and audiences, and shown last year at L’Étrange Festival, Stéphan Castang affirmed himself as one of the directors capable of leading a new wave of French fantasy films. Born January 30, 1973 in Versailles, prior to filmmaking he was involved in the theater. He notably acted in plays by Marion Guerrero, Benoît Lambert (Tartuffe, Enfants du siècle, a diptyque), Ivan Grinberg (Folie Courteline) or Thomas Poulard. In the theater group L’Artifice, he’s both an actor (Nam-Bok le hâbleur, Aucassin & Nicolette) and a playwright (Lettres d’amour de 0 à 10, winner of the Molière for Best Play for Young Audiences in 2005). He’s written several plays such as Boule de gomme, Le Défilé de César, Une divine tragédie (co-written with Sacha Wolff). He’s also a lecturer at the University of Burgundy-Franche-Comté and Paris 8 University.
Fiction interests him as much as documentaries. Before he directed a medium length film (Fin de campagne, 2014) and several short films like Jeunesses françaises (2011), Service Included (2014), Panthéon Discount (2016), Finale (2020), some winning awards, notably at Clermont-Ferrand, Pantin, Trouville and Brussels. He also enjoys cameo appearances for the cinema, as in La nuée (The swarm) where he plays a farmer, or even in his own film, where he can be seen as a policeman.
Stéphan Castang is undoubtedly fond of them, but doesn’t limit himself to genre movies, but rather affirms his desire to present different things, his eclectic cinema tastes stretching from Bresson to Carpenter, as well as the Z movies he discovered in videoclubs. So Vincent Must Die is illuminated by the encompassing love of those who despise no expression, but use and celebrate them all. For Vincent Must Die, Stéphan Castang claims he wanted to avoid the heavy footed realism of a ‘cinema of intention’ and instead advocate a cinema of movement, that observes bodies in action. If the influences of Carpenter or Romero - whom he admires - are visible in Vincent Must Die, the film nevertheless remains unique in its approach, notably in its gradual escape from reality, like a mutation affecting the film as much as its hero. This fascination with monstrosity, bodily metamorphosis, and dysfunction remains at the heart of the films he has selected for his carte blanche.
