Finis Terrae

End of the Earth

Four men travel to a remote island to collect seaweed. A young man is injured following a quarrel and ends up passing out from a fever. When the inhabitants of the neighbouring island do not receive the signal they were expecting, they launch a rescue mission in a heavy storm. FINIS TERRAE is the miraculous first entry in the series of films that Epstein shot in the islands of Brittany, his second home in the 1930s. Their stories are definitely not the main attraction; FINIS TERRAE is above all a visionary masterpiece of the rhythmic, powerful, harmonic orchestration of light, stretches of wind-swept land, bodies and water. Epstein talks about his trip with the “cinematograph on the archipelago”: “I had come here to film men who are accustomed to the four elements, who fished for seaweed, dried it and burnt it; men who stretched…

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Jean Epstein, France, 1928, 80min, Four men travel to a remote island to collect seaweed. A young man is injured following a quarrel and ends up passing…