A new cli-fi movie from French director Mlle. Magali Magistry set for October 2016 release, titled EXPIRE

''Expire'' (to be directed and released in 2016 by Ms. Magali Magistry of Brittany, France): The theme: man-made global warming is at the heart of her cli-fi film

AlloCiné: Tell us a little bit about your new movie.

Magali Magistry: EXPIRE  is a film about climate change which follows the trials and tribulations of a young French girl named Lila in a world that has become heavily polluted. A very toxic fog has covered the planet and forced people worldwide to live confined indoors. In my film, I envisage a world where the environmental devastation that we have collectively perpetrated on our fragile planet has made the Earth uninhabitable for humans. If one often speaks of water as a precious asset, what about the air? In some future time, breathable air  may very well become a rare commodity. Scary. That's my movie, in a nutshell.

AlloCiné: Where did you found the inspiration for this film?

 

Magali Magistry: I like the evocative power of films about global warming and climate change which can have the public impact of a warning flare, a wake up call, a cri de coeur. Over the years, images of air pollution in communist China's meg-cities like Beijing have come to haunt me. I see  on TV people forced to move on the streets wearing masks to filter the air, and to me this looks like an apocalyptic image. This inspired my movie.

But in fact, truth be told, my film was actually born from the shock I felt by seeing the Eiffel Tower lost in an amazing and disgusting pollution haze in March 2015. What would be our daily life if these exceptional days of smog and unbreathable air ecame the rule? If the pollution intensified globally and persisted? That's my film in a nutshell.

I grew up in the countryside of France, not in Paris, and I wondered what would happen to the fields and forests of my childhood. That would become the ranchers and farmers who depend on Nature to live? What they confined at home, prisoners of a hostile nature? But if an ecological disaster defines the context of the film, it is not the subject. My question is rather the following: What is it that defines the beauty of our humanity, in an environment destroyed by humanity? What on Earth reduced our lives to living in a thick toxic fog?

 

The main character of my film, Lila, is a young ordinary French girl. My film ends on a note of hope, please understand. Yes, it is dystopian but it ends with hope. If Lila manages to live a normal life in the future, with her dreams, her bad and good choices, then it will embody a form of hope, a faith in humanity. That's me. That's EXPIRE. That's my movie. We start shooting in the spring of 2016, if all goes well, and casting is completed and we find the perfect little girl to play the role of LILA, and then I hope to release the movie in France (and later worlwide via film festivals) in the fall of 2016.

LAST QUESTION: Is the movie cli-fi or sci-fi.

 

Magali Magistry:  In France, so far, we do not use this term cli-fi so much yet, although sci-fi novelist Jean-Marc Ligny has written a trilogy in this vein of literature, you might say sci fi mixed with cli fi, and EXPIRE, my movie, will follow the same trajectory. So for sci fi fans, they can call the movie sci fi if they wish. And for those who are now following the new genre of cli-fi, I guess my movie fits there, too. Most of all, putting aside the genre, it's a movie I want to make to help ''raise the alarm'' about climate change impacts in the future -- before it's too late!