This article appeared in the June 20, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

7 Walks with Mark Brown (Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré, 2024)

Pierre Creton is a gardener and filmmaker based in the Pays de Caux region of Normandy. Since the early 1990s, when he finished art school in Le Havre and returned to his coastal village of Vattetot-sur-Mer, he has also worked as a cowherd, a beekeeper, a seasonal endive farmer, and a weigher at a dairy inspection office. Over the years, he has documented his daily life in a series of beguiling autofictional films featuring a recurring cast of friends, neighbors, and animals. Since 2005, his partner, the sculptor Vincent Barré, has also variously acted in, co-written, and co-directed these projects with Creton; together they’ve accumulated a body of shorts and features, spanning both narrative and nonfiction modes, that convey a frank and non-moralistic compatibility among manual labor, sex, and the natural world.

Barré and Creton’s partnership began while the latter was shooting his first commercially released feature, Secteur 545 (2005). In this documentary about his stint as a milk quality controller, Creton fine-tuned what is now his signature approach, blending patient observation, reenactments, and ruminative conversations (he asks dairy farmers, “What is the difference between man and animal?”) that draw our attention to the strange things we do to other forms of life under capitalism. Creton’s process is social and aleatory, and he folded his encounter with Barré into the film: in one of its threads, Creton’s boss models for a sculpture by a local artist, and Barré attends the exhibition opening. From that point forward, all of Creton’s films bear Barré’s imprint—particularly their co-directed botanical documentaries L’Arc d’Iris: Memory of a Garden (2006) and 7 Walks with Mark Brown (2024), in which Barré’s eye for plant forms and colors deepens Creton’s vibrant diagrams of the many points of contact among humans, flora, and fauna.

This month, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is holding the first-ever U.S. retrospective of Creton’s work, with six feature films and two programs of shorts, all made in the context of his relationship with Barré. Many have never been screened outside of France. The shorts programs are titled “Traveling” and “Dwelling” (Barré loves to travel; Creton prefers to stay close to home). “Traveling” includes L’Arc d’Iris, a video study of high-altitude flowers in the Himalayas, where the filmmakers find species also present in Normandy, spread in the 19th century by the British Empire. Creton and Barré never appear in the frame but for an occasional hand to steady a small bud. “Dwelling” centers on their home and revisits the origins of Creton’s practice. He first picked up a video camera in the early 1990s to record his relationship with a reclusive older farmer, Jean, who died in 2001; Creton bought Jean’s house, and it has since become a locus for several of his films.

Creton and Barré’s relationship is at the center of A Prince, Creton’s breakout, semi-autobiographical 2023 feature about the sexual coming of age of a gay gardener. As an apprentice, Pierre-Joseph (Antoine Pirotte) initiates a sexual relationship with his botany instructor, Alberto (Barré), and a plant-nursery owner, Adrien (retired farmer Pierre Barray, a longtime friend and lover of Creton and Barré). The older men mentor Pierre-Joseph in art, poetry, and gardening; their intergenerational lovemaking, generous and quotidian, is entwined with their agricultural labor. This is not to say it is dry: the sex is fantastically erotic, but, seen through Creton’s lens, so are flowers, dirt, and beetles (the director shares a DP credit with Pirotte and Léo Gil-Mena). When Pierre-Joseph draws plant specimens for Alberto, he holds them up to the light, and we see the pornographic photographs he has printed on the paper’s verso. Of an early sexual experience with his cousin, he recalls that “his cum, after a day in the forest, tasted of beechnuts.” As with Creton and Barré’s other projects, A Prince is funny and unpredictable, and tinged with the supernatural—throughout, Pierre-Joseph seeks a mythical prince, who finally shows up toward the end with a medusa-like penis animated with CGI. (At this point in the story, Pierre-Joseph is played by Creton himself.)

Creton and Barré’s latest co-directed feature (and Creton’s 36th film) is the quiet documentary 7 Walks with Mark Brown (2024), a highlight of the New York Film Festival last year. The film is the result of another friendship: Creton and Barré met Mark Brown, a paleobotanist, at a screening of L’Arc d’Iris in 2008; Brown appears as a version of himself in A Prince, lecturing on his “crazy botanical project” to re-create an ancient garden. 7 Walks with Mark Brown follows Brown as he seeks out native plants for this garden, “The Dawn of Flowers,” in seven different locations in Pays de Caux. In the first part of the film, titled “The Shooting” and recorded by Creton with a handheld digital camera, a small group accompanies Brown through peat bogs, estuary meadows, and riverbanks; among them is Pirotte, who is seen filming each specimen with a 16mm camera. Brown marvels (and sheds tears) as he makes his discoveries. The film’s second half, titled “The Herbarium,” reveals these silent, radiant, celluloid-shot images, as Brown narrates his first viewing of the footage in voiceover. He makes poetry of taxonomy. “Beta vulgaris, subspecies maritima: Sea beetroot.”

There is a utopian quality to these films, but Creton and Barré’s life in Vattetot-sur-Mer is not a retreat from the burning world. Rooted in their collaborative mode of filmmaking and unalienated labor, their works model a communal life removed from urban capitalism, nationalism, and traditional family structures—particularly in Normandy, where the far right is ascendant. Creton’s narrative feature A Beautiful Summer (2019), co-written by Barré, follows two teenage Guinean refugees who move in with a gay couple (a clear stand-in for the filmmakers) to help with farmwork and acclimate to life in France; meanwhile, the couple start a romantic relationship with another recently arrived migrant. In voiceover, Creton observes that the film is based on a “shared imprisonment—that of the exiles who are held for months in the Calais Jungle [a refugee camp], and the imprisonment that we ourselves suffer when faced with this state of affairs.” In the 2017 feature Go, Toto!, one of Creton’s gardening clients adopts an orphaned wild boar, which brings her into conflict with the town, but also into a close friendship with another older woman. Her story is cross-cut with Creton’s visits to an ailing farmer who narrates his dreams. These films gently unearth the politics of aging, care, and death, bringing to mind Derek Jarman’s films about his cottage and garden in England, where he was nursed by a close friend as AIDS took his eyesight. (Images of Jarman’s garden appear in A Prince.)

Creton’s latest short film, Still Life Primavera (2025), records the spring equinox. Its description: “Spring Equinox, 2024: March 20 at 03:06:21 (universal time). Vattetot-sur-Mer, in the Pays de Caux region of Normandy, Gaza is under bombardment.” By announcing the simultaneity of these events, he complicates the pastoral calm of the images, and draws a relationship between the two faraway places. For Creton and Barré, to be grounded in one’s landscape is also to be open to the world. “There is no need to move,” Creton has said. “The world moves around us.”

Olivia Crough is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in art, film, and visual studies at Harvard University.