Karlovy Vary 2025: Before / After | Interview with Manoël Dupont

It was an interesting spot for an impromptu interview with director Manoël Dupont, right after his debut film Avant / Après (Before / After) screened on the footsteps of the red carpet at the Karlovy Vary Municipal Theatre, which is the venue for the Proxima Competition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) 2025.

It is hard to describe Dupont’s film, for his debut ends up making you ask questions with its unorthodox approach to life. Before / After isn’t a film that adheres to traditional storytelling arcs or genres. It’s part fiction, part documentary, part improvisation, and all emotion.

“I think I’ll be better able to describe the film later,” he says candidly at the start of our conversation. “It’s so fresh.” And it shows. For Manoël Dupont, cinema is not about giving answers; it’s about creating a space to get lost, stumble into meaning, and maybe leave with more questions than you started with.

At its core, Before / After follows two close friends who travel to Istanbul for a hair transplant—an act that is simultaneously mundane, vain, profound, and existential. “The real centre of the film,” says Dupont, “is the relationship between the two characters. The transplant is almost an alibi. It creates the frame, but the real story is their connection and everything that emerges from it.”

This film is shot in a hybrid style. Dupont and his actors, Jeremie and Baptiste—both real-life friends (they all met doing theatre)—navigated real-world clinics, city streets, and chance encounters in Istanbul.

“We had one take for many scenes. Sometimes we knew the lines, sometimes we improvised. There was no second truth, no reset button. So even the fictional parts were filmed with documentary urgency.”

Talking about using real people and not actors, he added: “We needed characters that could go beyond their real selves. That way we could keep our creativity alive while still being truthful. It’s about bringing your own part to the screen.”

Since Dupont knew nothing about the world of cosmetic surgery before the project, he was keen on exploring and tagging along with his friends—when he thought of this story as a kind of exploration of vulnerability, transformation, and identity.

“I wanted to accompany them, not just as a filmmaker, but as a friend—besides also trying to make something artistic out of it.”

There are some light moments in the film, which help to soften the emotional and difficult moments that the characters go through. “It’s not a comedy, even if people laugh. The characters are light, but what they’re going through is hard. They’re in the real world, and it’s rough.”

Why is the film called Before / After? When quizzed, the director said: “There’s always this illusion of after—after the operation, after the premiere, after the next beer,” he laughs. “But then ‘after’ arrives, and you’re still searching for the next one. That’s how we work as humans, right?”

The film’s poignant final sequence, in which one friend seems to vanish, leaving the other questioning the very reality of their shared experience, was the first scene he wrote. “It came from this strange sensation I once had, losing someone in a foreign city for a few hours. The feeling of: Did that person exist? Did what just happened matter?” His voice trails off. “That’s what I wanted to leave the audience with: Was it important?”

Before / After is not just about hair, or Istanbul, or even friendship. It is a study of that strange, shimmering age—the late twenties—when everything seems simultaneously open and closing.

“It’s such a weird age,” Dupont says. “You’re still close enough to being a teenager that you feel like anything is possible. But you’ve also done enough to look back and evaluate. There’s a sense of definition creeping in. Like, you’ve already been someone, and yet you can still become someone totally different.”

That feeling is etched across the faces of his two leads: hopeful, restless, often lost. “They think they’re missing something. They think it’s the hair. But it’s something else. And that’s the question that haunts them—and maybe us, too.”

At 29, Dupont is clear about one thing: he’s still in the thick of it—the contradictions, the doubt, the desperate search for meaning, all of it.

“I think the film stayed with me in that way. Even now, I ask myself: Is this a film about what it means to become an adult? To lose things, to try to grab them back, to define yourself?”

As we wrap up, Dupont smiles—half reflective, half relieved.

“I spent so long alone with this baby. I couldn’t wait to show it to people. Now I’m just happy it’s alive.”

We are thrilled to be reporting directly from the Czech Republic at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.