“At the heart of Before / After is a question I couldn’t shake: Is this relationship important?
That question shaped everything. The way I saw the characters, their connection, oscillating constantly between closeness and distance. I wanted that uncertainty to stay alive throughout the film, for them and for the audience.

I carried this relationship in my head for a long time before I found the right frame. I knew what I wanted emotionally, but the context was missing. Then two longtime friends, Baptiste and Jérémy, told me they were planning to get hair transplants. They spoke about it like a secret. It felt fragile, funny, a little sad. It hit me immediately. This was the frame I’d been looking for. A story of bodies shifting, of people trying to change, and the ambiguity of what that change means. They agreed to do it on the condition that we shoot quickly. The clock was ticking; the hair kept falling. It was the urgency I needed.

What fascinated me about the transplant was its simplicity. Hair isn’t added, just moved from one place to another. It’s a displacement, not an addition. And yet, it changes everything. That small shift, barely visible, felt so profound to me. Like the emotional shifts between the two men. Like travel. Like love. We’re always hoping for transformation, even in the smallest gestures. But what marks change? When do we say something has truly happened?

The title Before / After comes from those clinical ads we’ve all seen. Binaries, clear-cut transformations. I liked confronting that binary, only to question it. The film lives in the in-between. I was 27 while shooting; the actors were nearing 30. That age brings a strange suspension. You have a version of yourself, but you still believe you can reinvent it. That tension, between versions of self, between past and future, mattered to me as much as the transplant itself.

We built the film without a traditional script. It was improvised around clear intentions. We spent time exploring the characters’ shared past, then allowed everything else to be guided by real-world interactions. Most of the people in the film were locals we met while shooting. We asked them simply to be themselves. Some leaned into that. Others became something else entirely. But always, something honest emerged. The line between fiction and documentary didn’t interest me much. It’s more exciting when one feeds the other. Improvisation made us attentive. It placed us all on the same level. We shot a lot. Very little made the final cut. That tension, between what matters and what’s trivial, was always present.

We shot in Istanbul during the 2023 elections. I hadn’t planned it that way, but it quickly became part of the film. The city was charged. You couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t want to turn the film into a commentary on Turkish politics, but I also didn’t want to pretend we weren’t there, in that moment. It became part of the texture. The characters are tourists, passing through. Observers. Much like us. With my cinematographer, Thibaut, we chose to film like tourists too. Small crew, lightweight setup. We wanted to blend in. The fiction had to feel real, and reality had to flirt with fiction. In a world saturated with images, we found it was sound that drew attention. A camera passed unnoticed, but a boom mic disrupted the scene instantly.

Before / After is a film of fragments. Built in editing with Romain Waterlot, from nearly 40 weeks of material. A film that lives in its ellipses, in what’s missing. We hoped to make something soft but precise. Gentle, without cynicism. It could have easily turned ironic or cruel. But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to judge. Baptiste and Jérémy are a great duo. Funny, yes, but the humor had to come naturally. Never forced. The moments I loved most were the ones that stayed neutral, or quiet, or unresolved. Moments that felt like real life.

In the end, I don’t aim to deliver a message. I hope instead to leave the audience with a trace, something fragile, already past, but still present.
Something that grows slowly.”

SCREENER