Orly

“Airport” was once a successful novel (by Arthur Hailey) and later a star-studded movie, depicting a major hub as a site of intertwining fates and stories. ORLY is something like an auteurist version of this classical topos: the boarding zone of the airport on the southern periphery of Paris becomes a site for encounters and conversations, seemingly picked up almost at random and necessarily in fragments.
A married woman flying to Montreal loses her coat and becomes interested in a man departing for San Francisco; a son and his mother on their way to a funeral drift into a confessional conversation; a young blond-haired man mostly just sits quietly, until he also becomes part of the fabric of the story.
Schanelec shot on location, with the dialogue mostly in French. To a certain degree, ORLY is an extension of PLÄTZE IN STÄDTEN, while focusing on a setting that French anthropologist Marc Augé famously termed as a quintessential non-place. In an airport like Orly, nothing is specific, yet almost everything is generic and functional – save for the people crowding such sites. ORLY testifies to this tension, which is essential for modernity. (Bert Rebhandl)

In presence of Angela Schanelec.