The Telling of the Stones
Étienne de France
In The Telling of the Stones, de France draws on the intellectual and poetic affinity between Édouard Glissant and Thor Vilhjálmsson to construct a speculative narrative that moves across geographies, histories and temporalities. The film interweaves trajectories: a Kalinago woman fleeing colonial violence across the Caribbean basin, guided by spirit stones, and two men traversing the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, recalling stories of inscriptions carved into rock.
Across these parallel movements, stones function as carriers of memory, language and orientation, holding fragments of histories that exceed linear narration. The film proposes an archipelagic imagination in which distant territories remain connected through shared experiences of displacement, survival and inscription.