The Last Ashes

“The Western genre, that essentially American genre, was my introduction to the language of cinema. Later, I developed a passion for Italian-American Westerns, and it was this that pushed me to consider making films. It was therefore logical that writing and directing a European Western, more precisely a Luxembourgish Western, would be my first venture into the world of feature films.

Introducing a dynamic female character who carries a film soaked in a fundamentally macho genre was a priority, as was appropriating the mythic genre of the West and transposing it to the Luxembourg context. This small country in the middle of Europe, nowadays known worldwide as a financial center, was founded as a state as late as 1839 and therefore has a relatively young history. Inspired by this late quest for independence, THE LAST ASHES is rooted in a population closed in on itself, its traditions, and its piety—traces of which still exist in current generations.

However, I chose to anchor the story of THE LAST ASHES in the frame of a fairy tale, like those by Charles Perrault whose desire in the 17th century was to make the fairy tale as popular as possible and for it to gain recognition as a literary genre. Perrault appropriated popular folk stories from the oral tradition and turned them into highly moral fairy tales. These elements of the fairy tale find their roots in mythology specific to the genre of the Western.”

Loïc Tanson