How did you come up with the desire to see, process and edit archive footage, and how did you focus on this limbo between adolescence and coming of age?
In high school, we were fans of Jim Jarmush movies. One night, after the shooting of a fictional film, we filmed ourselves smoking joints and listening to music. On the box of this tape, I wrote: “Rushes n°1”. Other tapes followed. For a few years, I filmed my life, my friends, moments of daily life, parties, sometimes nothing. One day, I went to live in Brussels, I stopped living this way. The film tells the story of the passage of a few people from sixteen to twenty years old, because that’s all I filmed. Years later, one of these friends died. I needed to see these images again.
Naturally, the distance of time has molded a new perspective, a panoply of celebration exists in the film but, at the same time, there’s a reflexive introspection, where the doubt takes a primordial place. Could It’s Party Time be considered, paradoxically, as a collective “selfie”?
I tried to build this movie halfway between a work on the intimate (an apprentice filmmaker who films his friends) and a kind of anthropological object: a testimony on a group of young people who party, in France, at the end of the 1990s. The editor and I realized that my presence as a young, solitary man was important. The party is a metaphor, there is always a moment, before and after, when you go home alone, when you ask yourself questions. I don’t think that the film is a portrait of a generation, or of an era, but it is perhaps a film that asks questions. During the first viewings, some people started to talk to us about their own youth, which made us happy.
The idea of party is present in many occasions. But does the spectator witness a kind of happiness of precipice?
There is a constant idea of an end like something will start again. There is a kind of passage in the film between collective moments, parties – we smoke, we listen to music – and moments, a few years later, when we start talking to each other, trying to make sense of things. There are scenes where we talk about love. For a very long time, I thought that one day I would be able to make a film about girls and boys. Every time I tried, it was always after a story, to fix something. Twenty years have passed. Many things change. I was surprised when I realized that, finally, the film I made in my life is a film about friendship. I love my friends very much.
