About Mirmillon

Camille Holtz and Pierre Tremerel, a filmmaking duo. We met during the Master 2 Documentary Cinema program at Lussas in 2015. Since then, we have continuously collaborated on our respective projects: Alice + Barbara (2021) by Camille Holtz and Api Penyucian (in progress) by Pierre Tremerel. In 2019, we decided to combine our efforts and our visions of cinema by co-directing our first film together: Miki Zoo (Serbia). Now, we are working together on a constellation of short and feature-length documentary projects that we wish to write and direct together: Tokunoshima (Japan), Mrowki i Chrystus (Poland), and La Vallée des Merveilles (France). In 2021, we founded the audiovisual and film production association, Mirmillon, to officially bring together our various projects and co-produce them. Camille Holtz and Pierre Tremerel are supported by the CNC with author support funding. "Our association is called Mirmillon. With Mirmillon, we aimed to create an indivisible structure that brings us together and represents us. It takes its name from a category of Roman gladiators. In our personal story, the city of Nîmes and its arenas played a foundational role. But it is mainly our vision of documentary cinema that is symbolically embodied in the gladiatorial fights. One day, we read that the essential difference between fiction cinema and documentary cinema is the stakes of death. In fiction, the person you see on screen does not die for real. In documentary, they do. Even though the boundary between these two sides of cinema is often very porous, there is still an unshakable reality that distinguishes them. In documentary, reality, the unexpected, and inevitability will always take precedence in the film's narrative construction. As documentary filmmakers, we are determined to keep this in mind at all costs. Like in a gladiatorial fight, a shadow constantly hangs over the spectacle of documentary cinema, and this is precisely what makes it strong in our eyes."