In the heart of a forest runs a river, its flow strong and clear, over a bed of rocks shaped by nature with infinite patience. Between two dips or next to the fire, children, families, teenagers, friends and couples here talk about the meaning of existence, love, their dreams, their regrets or their fears. They offer their thoughts about death and our place in History. Borrowing as much from pictorial romanticism, symbolism and the sublime as from the philosophical dialogues of Plato and the poetic strolls of Robert Walser, capturing thought in action with rare sensitivity, Jean-François Lesage (Conte du Mile End, Vdr, 2013) uses pure and rigorous editing to build a collective reflection, deeply human and universal. An abridgement of lives that can be seen in a perfect unity of time and place. The splendour of nature that serves as the film’s setting is then no longer only a background for the thoughts that are expressed, but their very motor. It serves as a reminder of the beautiful and the true, whose quest occupies the filmmaker as much as the protagonists', in a gesture of philosophical simplicity.