The eruption of a volcano, the population of a village fleeing to a forest because of it and what they find when they get back home are only an excuse for an experience in editing. Using dozens of old homemade videos and recovered archive material, "After the Volcano" is a collage of countless cuttings of crazy sequences that pop up at kaleidoscopic speed. Those shootings are here adapted to an imagined story told in different voices. An image, or sequence of images, can in itself contain several interpretations or meanings. However, when that image is surrounded and enraptured by a story, it becomes something new. If an image is then worth a thousand words, in this film by French filmmaker Léo Favier words lead the images. A fire turns into an eruption, snow turns into ash, a walk through the woods becomes an adventure, and animals at play reveal their existential problems. The outcome is an intoxicating fable, an imaginative reverie where ideas overlap the personal shootings, which thus gain a new life. (JA)