Dir: Eléonore Saintagnan | France, 2023, 69 mins
Éléonore Saintagnan’s Camping du Lac is the kind of film that slips through conventional categories with quiet confidence. Part essay film, part rural ethnography, part folktale and part deadpan comedy, this deceptively slight 69-minute debut unfolds like a lazy summer afternoon whose apparently idle meanderings gradually reveal unexpected depths. Mood-wise it reminded me a bit of Alain Giraudie’s 2013 breakout hit Stranger by the Lake
Screening as its UK premiere at the London TFFF, it is one of those rare discoveries that feels simultaneously intimate and elusive and Saintagnan casts herself as a lightly fictionalised version of herself, stranded in rural Brittany when her car breaks down.
Taking refuge in a lakeside campsite supposedly inhabited by a legendary beast, she wanders from mobile home to mobile home collecting anecdotes, half-truths, memories and local lore. The monster itself proves almost incidental. Instead, the film becomes fascinated by the stories people tell—not simply to entertain, but to define places, preserve communities and quietly reinvent themselves.
Rather than building towards revelation, Camping du Lac luxuriates in digression, meandering langourously around its rural settings. Saintagnan possesses an uncanny eye for the comic poetry of everyday encounters: eccentric campers, weathered locals and passing conversations become fragments of an ever-expanding mythology. Her camera observes with anthropological patience yet never with clinical distance; there is affection in every frame. Reality is constantly nudged sideways until fantasy feels like its perfectly logical extension.
The film embraces natural light and pastoral textures without ever romanticising rural France. The lake itself becomes a liminal space where memory, folklore and imagination blur into one another. Saintagnan’s understated narration and dry wit lend the film an effortless charm, inviting audiences to surrender to its gently drifting rhythm rather than search for narrative certainty.
What makes Camping du Lac so refreshing is its refusal to privilege fact over invention. Saintagnan argues, almost mischievously, that stories matter less because they are true than because they are shared. The legendary beast lurking beneath the lake is simply another character in a community sustained by collective imagination. In that respect, the film recalls the playful essayistic spirit of Agnès Varda while possessing a distinctly contemporary sensibility that is entirely its own.
Its deliberate pace may frustrate viewers looking for dramatic momentum, but those willing to tune into its frequency will find a richly rewarding meditation on folklore, belonging and the strange alchemy by which cinema transforms observation into myth. Like the elusive creature beneath its placid waters, Camping du Lac reveals itself only gradually—but once it does, its gentle spell lingers long after the credits roll. It is a quietly enchanting reminder that the most compelling journeys are often the ones that never seem to arrive anywhere at all.
Friday 7 August, 6:30PM | Followed by a Q&A with Eléonore Saintagnan