Sunlit Apocalypses

What if the apocalypse were to arrive on a sunny day?

The word apocalypse comes from Greek and means, in fact, “to reveal.” And, within our film program, revelation occurs through all sorts of catastrophes.

When Ionuț Mareș invited me to present Erogenesis (2025) at Ceau Cinema, I proposed we show it alongside two other films that have stayed with me. La herida luminosa (2022) by Christian Avilés and Il faut regarder le feu ou brûler dedans (2022) by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel.

La herida luminosa counterfeits 16 mm archival footage to weave the story of a group of British teenagers on holiday in the Balearic Islands. They are depressed, and all they want is to tan with no sunscreen. At noon, when the sun burns hardest, Sam, the most depressed of them, gets ready to leap from the hotel balcony and urges the others to record him. The phones rise into the air, and Sam believes he will fly toward the sun. But Christian Avilés has a way of seeing entirely his own. Everything looks like a fever dream melting on celluloid. The film turns the holiday into a pilgrimage, and the teenagers into worshippers of the sun. The leap from the balcony becomes the soaring of a modern-day Icarus. Later, two paramedics, having arrived at the scene, philosophize in the ambulance. What’s with this British obsession of leaping from balconies? It’s the sixth one this week. Some old curse, perhaps, cast on them long ago by a people they once subjugated. A force that pushes them to try to fly into the arms of the sun. 

Il faut regarder le feu ou brûler dedans starts from the phenomenon of summer wildfires in Corsica. The director, Caroline Poggi, plays a mystical pyromaniac who sets fire to the fields in an endless heat. She is, in fact, an eco-terrorist defending the land. She loathes the lumps of concrete and urban debris that spread across the island like a tumor. She believes that fire is the only way to heal her beloved Corsica of this ugliness humans produce. The film opens with an indie pop song, impossibly sweet, but its lyrics are the murderous fantasies of a child. As if we were inside the mind of an infantile dictator. The montage has a nervous energy, perhaps the residue of video-game aesthetics. You can see Caroline move through the frame like an avatar, followed by a player. Which probably means the player is you. The film practices a kind of narrative hybridization. A deliberate confusion, in which different voices melt together until we can no longer tell who is speaking to us. Where we, the embodied viewers, end, and the protagonist begins.

With Erogenesis we find ourselves in a full-blown post-apocalypse, somewhere inside a seventies fantasy of what the future might look like. Yet no one panics. On the contrary, the mood is one of dolce far niente. The world is divided into camps, as on a game board. We have a group of weightlifters who fashion themselves as Olympians, a Christian pro-natalist corporation, and, between them, a group of researchers who could incidentally save the species. Once, they created a device that would enable them to produce new life. A giant steel spider that is, for now, resting in the basement. And that’s because our researchers can’t really agree if repopulating the planet is actually a good idea. Besides, they have a far more burning concern. The study of sensuality. 

But beyond their particular catastrophes, our films have something else in common. A tonal obliqueness and a sidelong gaze. They divert catastrophe from the straight line of gravity. They see the use of getting lost rather than finding the way.¹ We have here music-video aesthetics, pink sticker fonts, 16 mm calophilia, and fairy-tale voices. These voices don’t really know how and, in fact, don’t even try to explain the world. But they know how to enchant it. They make everything seem simple, almost stupid, and then strange. Catastrophe does not arrive here as a great tragedy. It comes in disguise. As a dream filled with glockenspiel chimes, as pyromaniac hubris, or as idleness and sensuality.

¹ Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, 2011.

Xandra Popescu, June 2026