Five teenagers spend some days off in the countryside. Hugo and Lara are a couple, as are Brian and Manon. Samy doesn’t have a girlfriend, but follows his friends wherever they go. They all need to escape a routine that strangles them; a world that they don’t think understands them. A legitimate, natural, feeling of a passionately lived adolescence, and days of heat, alcohol and ravings. But also days when all inner fury is exorcised, burning everything it touches. Alcohol and fury, in a place as free as it is depressing, take the characters to feel something they hadn’t felt before: fire.

The green, arid and hostile landscapes of the Mediterranean forest of the Languedoc-Roussillon hosts this bonfire of vanities of a group of heterogeneous and identifiable teenagers, a portrait of a lost youth that know exactly where they are. A fight of contradictions and egos that takes the audience to a recognizable place that, at the same time, becomes strange and oneiric.

In the words of the director, young Simon Rieth, “I wanted to film the last moments of childhood with sincerity, hounded by anguish and sadness, but also by melancholy and sweetness”.

The producer directs his brother, Hugo Rieth, the main character of this medium-length film financed by crowfunding through the online platform touscoprod.com. A unique epic story that moves between naturalism and daze, placing the director close to other filmmakers such as Larry Clark with his ‘Kids’, Maurice Pialat with ‘Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble’ or even Gus Van Sant’s ‘Gerry’. Simon Rieth explains that “I want to give space to the audience so they have the sense of having connected and understood my characters”.

‘Feu, mes frères’ (‘Gone Brothers’) is part of the Official Section of the 10th Edition of the International Medium-length Film Festival La Cabina, which takes place from the 16th to the 25th of November at the Filmoteca de Valencia.

GONE BROTHERS | Simon Rieth · France · 2016 · 46 min.