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