French director Sophie Letourneur returns after the success of her first film La vie au ranch, with a half-length film, The Shady Sailor (Le marin masqué, 2011). During 36 minutes, Letourneur narrates the trip friends Sophie and Laetitia make to Quimper, a small town in Brittany, to find the ‘shady sailor’, Laetitia’s first love.

Le marin masqué (Sophie Letourneur, 2011)

Filmed in black and white with both characters’ voice over of, this fictional half-length film creates a distance in the viewer that alludes to the documentary genre. Sophie Letourneur uses the legacy of great French directors like Rohmer, Godard or Eustache to make cinema out of trivialities, banalities, reality.

After studying Applied Arts, Letourneur filmed several experimental films and documentaries, such as La tête dans le vide (2004), Manue Bolonaise (2005) and Roc et Canyon (2007). In 2009 she shot her first fiction film, Chicks.

The Shady Sailor participated in the Corti d’Autore section of the Locarno Festival and in the Spectrum Shorts section of Rotterdam Festival.

The Shady Sailor is one of the films selected for the Official Section of the 5th Edition of Valencia’s International Half-length Film Festival ‘La Cabina’.