This film was shot during a Institut français, Hors les Murs Program (section film, video, cinema), arts residency in Montréal, Canada, in the summer of 2010. The project is a chronological record, each scene engendering the next. Working without written notes of what I shot, I recorded over 10 hours of video merely keeping in mind that the order in which everything was filmed had provoked what I was currently shooting. Returning to Paris for editing, I sorted my footage in repeated viewings. I had to find an atmosphere, a rhythm, a current, from scene to scene, that seemed compelling, a flow that underlied the shooting. This binding element is like an arc that was built up slowly, as the project progressed. It is an arc that brings together two images that are strictly unrelated, and makes one follow naturally on the other — a group of men, for example, casting a sidelong glance at a passing police car on a bridge at night, followed by a human foot that seems to emerge from a tree trunk in broad daylight and kick in rhythm. With each viewing, I preserved only those scenes that seemed most closely to fit this arc and eliminated everything else, all the while preserving the exact chronology of the shooting sequence. What remans is 39 minutes of video in 73 scenes.

'Jonny: The Shaman of Rust' is a gritty, humorous and heart warming documentary about Welsh artist Jonathan Sherwood who suffers with bipolar disorder. The filmed footage follows Jonny over three years (2012-2015) when he has to continuously move as a consequence of Newport city centre's urban transformation into a big shopping mall.