In his unique short film, A Storm Inside, filmmaker Clément Pérot explores the lives of teenagers in the Fort-Nieulay neighborhood on the outskirts of Calais, a working-class port in northern France where work and its profits have dried up. Avoiding a didactic approach to filmmaking, Pérot combines elements of documentary and fiction to create a self-expressive portrait for the children of the Calais suburbs whose idledom reflects the emptiness of industrial decay.

Influenced by directors like Pedro Costa and Jean-Charles Hue, whose work also occupies the border between documentary and fiction, as well as the early neorealists films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pérot relied on the interplay between these different modes of filmmaking “to encourage the young people” in the film “to embody themselves and offer them perspective on their daily lives to better tell it on screen.” In the case of Kyllianna, who ends up taking center stage for most of A Storm Inside, what began as a series of “video trials” emboldened her “to take ownership of the scenes and improvise,” according to Pérot.

“The film is anchored first and foremost in a place. In my work process, I first focus on existing places and the people who are part of them. It is from places and people that my desires for films and stories are born. What interests me here are these median spaces that are in tension with each other: the neighborhood, the wasteland, the wilderness, the roads and the industrial zones in the distance.” CLÉMENT PÉROT

Pérot wanted to avoid making direct cinema, which he likens to “stealing from these children.” Instead, he worked with the children and teenagers in the film to develop themselves as characters through gestures and storytelling. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a region in disrepair, told from those who experience its tedium most through long days and hopeless nights.

Clément Pérot is an emerging artist and filmmaker from France. He graduated from the EnsAD and the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2022. His films attend to working-class people and their environments, documenting both with depth and sensitivity. A Storm Inside screened in last year’s Director’s Fortnight at Cannes and Pérot is now working on a fiction short film titled Belle-Isle 1910, about a couple of young boys who vanish from a rural town off the coast of Brittany at the dawn of World War I.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.