La Traversée

In this stunning artist’s sketchbook, readers will discover a selection of 147 paintings and sketches from Florence Miailhe’s unpublished work, created for the eponymous film. Inspired by her own family’s history, Marie Desplechin tells the initiatory journey of two teenagers, Kyona and Adriel, who were forced to flee their home country. A captivating story told by the two distinct voices of Florence Miailhe and Marie Desplechin

The children’s wanderings find their roots in the many tales of youth lost in war and displacement – chiefly Aharon Appelfeld’s autobiographical novel, which recounts his crossing of war-torn Europe all the way to the Mediterranean.

Each chapter alternates between Miailhe’s drawings and short sequences from the film, reproduced frame by frame, showing the process between the preparatory work and the final product.

Xavier Kawa-Topor describes Florence Miailhe’s oeuvre most faithfully, as “an art of movement that plays not only with shapes and colors, but also with the material itself, its texture, thickness and fluidity, to produce gradations, nuances and transparencies. An art of continuous metamorphosis, of the overflowing of frames and contours that binds and carries everything away.”

Podcast of France Culture “Florence Miailhe, peindre en équilibriste”, ici