REBECCA (web app)
https://rebecca-parlerauxvivants.fr
/ CHARACTERISTICS
A web application that allows the dead to talk to the living, REBECCA was created by Simon, son of Rebecca and Pablo, who was born in the novel Tout est vrai (2018) and found again in the film Sans qu’aucun matin (2021).
/ A WORD FROM SIMON, designer of the application
Who wouldn’t dream of finding, after the death of a loved one, a notebook filled with a series of unpublished messages left by that person and addressed to oneself? Messages that would keep the field of possibilities open. Yes, the woman I loved is dead, but it’s not all over, because I still have these messages to read on the pages of the notebook she left me, precious and full of surprises.
My mother was called Rebecca. She died when I was born. She left me nothing, apart from a photo. I regret it very much. There’s nothing I can do about it. All of us who survive can’t do anything about it.
We can only write. And offer to those we love what we didn’t have, what we would have dreamed of. Yes, I can write to Lisa, Mircea and all those I love. Words they will receive if I leave before them.
But where? In which notebook? My application REBECCA is that notebook, but even better! You choose dates: the anniversary of a meeting, a wedding, a loved one’s birthday; or a celebration, Christmas perhaps, or Easter, and you write. You write thinking of the joy that your loved one will experience when they read it, later, afterwards. A long time later, many years, if you like. The joy of knowing that a series of messages awaits them.
Tragic messages, of course. Because love and death are tragic. And funny ones too, so you can see the other person smiling in anticipation.
Visit REBECCA and see what it has to offer. It’s all explained there.
Take care!
Simon
/ ORIGINS
1. In the film Tout est vrai, Zoé Jaspers tries to mourn the loss of Pablo, the boy she loved, who disappeared before her very eyes.
And to do so, she imagines that it was she who had disappeared, that Pablo had survived. In her novel Tout est vrai, she recounts the life he would have had then. How he would have met Rebecca, whom he would have loved, how they would have had a son together, whom they would have called Simon. That as soon as Simon was born, Rebecca disappeared too. That the child would have grown up close to his father, happy, yet crossed by a rift through which the abyss, the bottomless pit, the trace left by his mother’s absence, would spring up.
2. Simon is grown up now, an adult, finished his studies, in his twenties. He’s become a web developer. Because he wants to make up for the absence that has always haunted him with an application: Sans qu’aucun matin, which gives the film its name. But this application, which aims to control one’s destiny and guard against loss, is too theoretical, perhaps even inhuman, as his father and friends tell him. Faced with the failure of his project, and on the advice of his father, Simon sets off to visit the land of his childhood, the island of one of his summers, which reminds him of his mother.
3. On the island where he knows his parents loved each other before he was born, he begins to write to his mother. Letters to himself, in which he admits how he would have liked her to have left him a message, or the sound of her voice on a cassette, whatever; something he could have held on to, then.
4. It is by writing this unreciprocated correspondence that Simon gradually draws up the outlines of his new project, an application that allows the dead to speak to the living, which he names REBECCA in homage to his mother.
PRESENTATION (in French)
CREDITS
Conception by Simon ; programming : Jean Goua.
This project was selected and supported by the Fondation des Artistes’ patronage committee..