In competition

Paul & Paulette Take a Bath

Directed by Jethro Massey
United Kingdom 2024
Runtime 109'

A twisted romantic comedy about a young American photographer and a French girl with a taste for the macabre. Paul & Paulette’s chance encounter on a Parisian boulevard sparks an unusual friendship that grows around a dark game; reenacting scenes of notorious crimes from bygone eras at the sites they occurred. For Paul, the game is a way of getting closer to Paulette. For Paulette, it’s a way of escaping a painful break-up with her girlfriend, and of processing her own inherited trauma. As their morbid road trip approaches the more recent past it becomes more uncomfortable, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, but finding a surprising joy in the darker corners of humanity.

Directed by
Jethro Massey

Screenplay
Jethro Massey

Cinematography
Isarr Eiriksson, Marius Dahl

Editing
Julien Chardon

Music 
Julien Decoret (with songs by Marc Tassell)

Sound Design
Christophe d’Ornellas, Olivier Leroy, Xavier Thibault

Costumes
Joanna Wojtowicz

Cast
Marie Benati, Jérémie Galiana, Laurence Vaissière, Fanny Cottençon, Gilles Graveleau, Margot Joseph

Production
Jethro Massey (Film Fabric Ltd.)

Sales
Loco Films
Arnaud Godart
Laurent Danielou

39.SIC

Jethro Massey (1978) is a British-French filmmaker. He is drawn to the poetic and the absurd, and loves digging up the past to investigate the world around him today. He studied Russian, hitchhiked across Siberia, then moved to Paris to start his career; a journey that has taken him from the backstage of the Bolshoi to the homes of tribal clowns in the Malian savannah. His short films have travelled the festival world, picking up a few shiny objects along the way for their aesthetics, storytelling and originality.