Fu Le is a French choreographer, filmmaker and visual artist, and the artistic director of the dance company Tetrapode. He studied sculpture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués in Paris, then physical theatre in Buenos Aires, contemporary dance in Lausanne and choreography at the Taiwan National University of the Arts. In 2017, he founded Tetrapode, and in 2018 received the Beaumarchais-SACD Dance Award. His work lies at the intersection of dance, sculpture and video. He has directed around twenty dance films, which have been screened and awarded at festivals around the world. In 2020, he founded Tetralab, an international dance film laboratory. In his filmmaking, he also explores the choreography of the camera—the ways in which the camera itself can become part of the choreographic process.
Ode Naval brings Fernando Pessoa’s evocative poem to the body and into movement. Suspended in the air, two dancers sway and drift like sails in the wind, inhabiting the delicate space between departure and arrival, between the self and the other. The movement is mysterious and weightless, imbued with nostalgia and longing that swells like a sail.
The film explores distance—between the dock and the ship, between the inside and the outside, between the one who leaves and the one who remains. Poetry, choreography and cinematic imagery come together in a dreamlike, almost weightless world where desire and distance continually move towards and away from one another. Ode Naval is a lyrical study of travel, separation and the invisible spaces between people connected by horizons yet divided by distance.