“Zampano”, interview with director Teilo Quillard

At the Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema 2026, organized by European Film Promotion and the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Teilo Quillard presents his short film Zampano, a dreamlike story of vertigo, inheritance and the bond between a father and a son. Born to a French trapeze artist and an English aerial acrobat, Quillard grew up in the world of the circus and speaks five languages, as many as are heard in his film.

A circus of languages and cultures

Being selected for Future Frames feels, Quillard says, like “a real excitement… a real connection or like a gateway into European cinema,” a chance to meet people from other countries and learn how they produce, in the hope of finding a co-production partner for his next projects. Asked what it means to him to be a European director, he answers with an image drawn straight from his own background: “I’ve got a very circus-like view of cinema. I like using different languages, different people from different countries just like in a circus company, and mixing cultures within a project, within a story.” That mixing, he adds, “is a real way to create connections between us and bringing the film somewhere it wouldn’t be able to go if we were only in our own culture or own country.”

Between old and new

Zampano unfolds in a world Quillard describes as “realistic but has some sense of magic in it,” where the era is deliberately hard to place. He borrowed devices from early cinema, like the iris shot, “the lens opening,” as he calls it, while building a modern, layered sound design around them. In the film’s central image, he says, “when he goes up, the trapeze has like an entity, it’s almost like a character you can hear.”

Letting go of the father

Zampano is set in the world Quillard comes from: he is the son of a French trapeze artist and an English aerial acrobat. The film, he explains, is about a boy who wants to break free from his father and from the expectations projected onto him. “My view was that the father was projecting his own fears onto his son, which was the cause of the vertigo.” The flying trapeze became the natural symbol for that reckoning: “I thought flying trapeze was a great way of symbolizing the importance of letting go and of flying away from your parents.”

A punk circus, next

Quillard is now developing a feature set once again around flying trapeze, but in a very different circus from the one in Zampano. “It’s going to be much more ‘punk circus’,” he says, citing the French company Archaos as his main reference: “They took the traditional animals out and replaced them with motorbikes, trucks and cars; the clowns fought not with cream pies but with chainsaws and metal bars, with live punk music. I’m in love with that aesthetic and I want to make it exist in the feature film.”

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