I Lost Sight of The Landscape (2025) ‘Visions du Réel Review: Delightful Self-Reflexive Doc on Creative Journeys

Fresh in the wake of a disintegrated relationship and with several professional stints falling through, Sophie Bédard Marcotte decides to film her playwright neighbor, Gabriel, as he grapples with constructing and staging a riff on the Sisyphus myth. There’s not much structure but a freedom of enquiry and scope that eventually permeates the film “I Lost Sight of the Landscape.”

Sophie may not even have thought she’d stick it through till the very end, but she keeps going. The willingness to hold faith in the journey that pans out in unexpected directions and to delightful ends is both touching and richly absorbing. Patience and stubbornness are key, the playwright asserts to his actors who lie down on craggy rocks, wrestle with. They are asked to imagine and build a relationship with the rock. This is creative theatre that’s driven by untethered impulses. To lean into them is to put together the work without the burden of narrow definitions and containing territory-setting.

The wry, human, moving touch to the film makes it consistently charming, pulling us in a loosely floating rhythm. Sophie frequently insists throughout the film about being guided by his process, its openness a source of inspiration. Garbiel’s work leans into gestures and is intensive with physicality, initially negating any dialogue whatsoever. There’s no space for words in his theatre. But here is not an artist who lets himself and his principles stagnated, immovably fixed. Sophie’s film imbues this spirit with a lovely light hand. Instead of allowing a sense of defeat, the film is turned to the hopeful, a steady act of reconstructing and reassembling in the face of multiple crises.

Sophie follows his journey with keen curiosity, never imposing her presence, only gently tagging along. The two wander through geological sites, spaces of volatility and churn. He frets about finding the apt words for writing a persuasive grant essay, whereas so much of his work emanates from responsiveness to the moment. With no conventional bound scripts in hand, how can he even convince a funder to understand and appreciate his vision and back him? It’s tricky, seemingly contradictory, and generates much doubt and hand-wringing. Sophie documents it all with an unerring eye, constantly situating the many pit stops that come up in the course of artistic creation.

It’s a complicated journey demanding perseverance and pliability, an ease in confronting unforeseen roadblocks and strenuous rediscovery of oneself. Any creative pursuit is plagued by ebbs and troughs. They are as indispensable as the ultimate destination itself, the ‘final’ shape of the art form. COVID-19 interrupts, stalling with a brute force. But intervals, the film seems to suggest, may also bring positive surprise. Gabriel’s perspective on his play’s contours alters, making way for a “paradigm shift”. What may have been hitherto unconceivable becomes something worth toying with, even incorporating into the work.

The film is spread out over a couple of years, particularly those during which he is ideating his Sisyphus adaptation that’s expressly not a “strict” one. It’s free-spirited and shifting and vigorously permeable to new energies and tweaks in angles of thought. It’s fascinating to watch the film and the play bounce off each other, growing something congruent and provocative and stimulating. This is art that is comfortable seeping into the fabric of spontaneity, not weighed down by preconceptions and a stratified way of envisioning and developing things.

Art and life are woven together, both in flux and dissolving into each other. “I Lost Sight of the Landscape” is filled with expansive transparency, hence catching even the minor impressions fluttering past. By turns amusing and revealing, we’re intimately acquainted with a relationship between strangers that keeps deepening. The way this grows makes for an alluring experience, ensconced always in topography, place, and textures. The tactile is ever-present, twisted into the folds of the inner journeys of two artists who come together and deliver a meta work spiked with wit and wisdom.

I Lost Sight of The Landscape premiered at the Visions du Réel Film Festival 2025.

I Lost Sight of The Landscape (2025) Movie Link: MUBI