KEPI…On a barren rural path, a lone guard enforces a gate that almost no one uses. When an inspector arrives—distinguished only by a taller hat—the rituals of authority are tested in a place where they are entirely unnecessary.

I cannot stop thinking about this film.
Not the script — the script is finished. What I cannot stop thinking about is what will live on the screen. The way the light will fall across flat open land at dawn. The sound of a walnut cracking under the weight of a gate beam. The accordion opening with that one weak breathy wheeze as a man walks away from everything he was.
Kepi is the simplest story I have ever written. A guard. A gate. A path. Two hats of different heights. And yet it is the hardest film I have ever tried to make — because simplicity of this kind is not arrived at easily. Every frame must earn its place. Every silence must mean something. Every object must carry the weight of an idea without announcing it.
I wrote Kepi in the spirit of Camus and Kafka — writers who understood that the most devastating truths arrive quietly, through the mundane, through the ordinary machinery of systems that exist for no one. Garde does not rage against his situation. He waters his flowers. He measures his height. He does his job. And when the job is taken from him he picks up his accordion and walks away. That is the whole film. And somehow it contains everything.
I want French audiences to see this film and feel something complicated — recognition, perhaps, or the particular vertigo of watching something absurd that is also completely true. I want them to feel that an American filmmaker working alone in the Central Valley of California understood something about their literary tradition that they thought only belonged to them.
That is an enormous ambition for a film with three characters, a gate, and a goat.
I believe Kepi is worth that ambition.