Utilising a pseudo-documentary mode to build a fictional story,Brussels-based French-Estonian actor, director, and filmmaker Manoël Dupont signs Before / After (Avant / Après), which premiered in the Proxima section at the 2025 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, winning a Special Mention and the FIPRESCI Award for the strand. Before / After features Baptiste Leclere and Jérémy Lamblot as Baptiste and Jérémy, two men who meet in Belgium before heading together to Istanbul for hair transplants. The experience brings the two together for a brief moment, a unique and treasured product of a particular time and space.
At the festival, Purple Hour sat down with Dupont to discuss the process of shooting this intimate debut feature that reaches beyond binaries of form, character, and process, where he melts away the binary between fiction and documentary so successfully it feels wrong to even use those terms.
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Purple Hour: You come from a theatre background. Are there aspects of working with the stage that you brought to your film?
Manöel Dupont: If I’m making a movie to tell this story, it’s really that this story is for movies, but I think there are two components of theatre that I keep with me. The first one is that theatre is a bit less hierarchical. In cinema, you have lots of money and lots of responsibility, it quickly becomes something where everybody needs to do their proper task and nothing else, which is understandable. In theatre, it happens so many times that one of the people on stage is also writing, and the other one is like, “I’ll bring this costume!” and someone else is like, “I’m going to do this improv with you!” and maybe it’s going to change something. That’s something that I like and am trying to keep in the movies that I make: the team and the fluidity of people moving from one place to another.
Given the shooting circumstances, I imagine that your team was quite small and collaborative, as you say.
In total, we were seven and some friends. It was funny because yesterday they asked me to tell about the people coming on stage and what they did. For some people like Kiran [Vassilieff], I say he’s the first assistant director, but he was just like, “my man” and everything.
Your right-hand man.
And we were roommates! Even during the whole preparation, we were meeting for a long time. I was like, are you ready to take six months of your life to do this? It’s not only planning and everybody ready on set, because we didn’t have that, for example. Each time we’re trying to make someone fit into a role.
Do you feel obligated to do that?
Not a lot, but you still have to. It’s not to say that I’m doing things differently. Maybe another time, I’ll want to do something like that. Since yesterday, I tried to put down some real definitions. But I don’t have a name for it. He was just a really great advisor. For me, he was an important person to have on set and to ask questions of sometimes, and he’s a good friend. He was so important during the whole movie, during the shooting, editing, everything. It’s also really related to friendship, honestly. People make the world turn. Most of the people whom I’m working with are also people from theatre and people who love cinema, but most of the time they are on the other side. It’s a weird energy where we’re all on the other side.
The film’s press notes emphasise the improvisational aspects of the film. Could you talk about the practicalities of this and shooting in Istanbul? You also shot when the Turkish elections were taking place.
I love improv. I wanted to give more space for the actors to influence the story. Maybe it’s also a way for me to wish how I would like to play. I don’t have any technique or process. It’s a bit like, for each scene, there is stuff we really have in mind. Sometimes it’s really sharp, like I know you need to say that and that and go, but honestly, most of the time, it’s like, we should have that before, and we know that we want to reach this point after. For this movie, the two actors were going to have a real surgery and be in contact with doctors in a country that they don’t know. They and the film crew were not going to be able to control a lot of things. I would say the preparation and what we were doing the rest of the time was a bit like a small window of power in all of these things you can’t control. If you have a small window with your body, your language as an actor, how are you going to light reality?
We had lots of conversations together about the movie as a feeling and what we want it to be. Your power is that there’s reality, and maybe you can influence the movie to go this direction. I think it was also frustrating for them sometimes because they are really good friends, but because they are, when they were shooting, they were always like, “What am I doing?” More practically, once they accepted the ways of operating, we said, let’s put a bit of distance and create some characters. It was really helpful for them and for everybody to do this and go more into emotion because it’s a character. We created backgrounds and lots of stuff for them. The beginning of the movie is more fictional; it’s in Belgium.
I was very moved by these friends allowing me to document this change and do something artistic with it. One of the things that we were talking about was that we were shooting for two weeks in Istanbul and then after the operation, but then we would not be able to shoot again. What we were feeling then, we can feel in the movie. The operation was really long and we couldn’t control much—not a lot of people were allowed to go in. I was in a room with an iPad watching what was happening and trusting my DoP [Thibaut Egler]. What I didn’t plan for was when they were so high [after the operation]. That was really weird. I was really like, what the fuck? I was prepared to see people that I really cherish having a bit of pain, but it’s really weird to see someone “leave”, you know—vanish, a bit. It’s nearly what we kept in the movie because it’s really what happened. It’s a good example of improvisation, because I gave them a few sentences, like imagining that your character is going to leave the next day, you know you’re going to split at one moment. But I was like, it’s your operation; don’t force yourself to do anything. But he did so many things related to the movie, and he said so much easier to focus on the movie during that time.
Did you witness a change in the dynamic between Baptiste and Jérémy over the course of the shoot?
Everything was very interesting to me because I was so obsessed with this relationship. The only thing I had in mind was that they are two people together but they’re kind of alone, and for each person, they’re looking for something. Right now, you only have the other person that you’re trying to reach. The question for myself was, is it beautiful or is it not? We talked a lot with the two of them about that. They’re such good friends and always kidding around together. It was hard telling them to stop being so much like that. However, it also gave them an instant tension, because I made them do stuff or speak in ways they’re not used to. I was like, stop watching the other, or look at him like that, or touch the other like that, or be slower. I’m so grateful that they offered me the opportunity to see that through them.
I think their relationship evolved during the shoot because we shot for a long time, for more than one month. One of the main things was the camera, as we filmed a lot without redoing the scenes. After a while, they were always in between moments. They kind of melted into their characters. There was a huge difference for Jérémy. It was the first time he was playing for cinema, and at the beginning, he was really proposing stuff. It’s kind of cool, because even in the movie you can feel he is slowly detaching from his performance and from a punchline. I like it because we use it also as an evolution of character, getting used to the camera, gaining more confidence with that.
Is there anything more about the process that stood out to you that you would like to share?
The Belgian part was so different than the Turkish part. The only date we had on the calendar was the surgery. We said we had to shoot all of this part before, and all of this after. Two times a week, we had a break, one day in your room, writing. I’m dreaming of making a movie one day where everybody has a script and everybody really knows the story. I was speaking about that yesterday night and was like, I love this freedom, but it’s also a burden. One interesting thing was that there was Wassim [Aboushala], whom we met during the shooting. The first time we met him, we didn’t plan anything. It was like, let’s speak and see what happens. But it went so well, and we were like, it could be good to hang out with you, we’re in Istanbul for a while. We became friends. After a while, I was like, it could be good to make you come back [in the film]. It was more forced, more like fiction. But it was interesting to meet someone who is not an actor the rest of the time and to make him play.
