"The flower's insatiable passion turns its life into a circus of debauchery."
7 Walks with Mark Brown is a documentary about French plants and the paleobotanist who loves them, and when I describe it that simply to friends, sometimes their eyes glaze over and they say something deadly like, “Oh… well, I guess that sounds nice.”
7 Walks is, of course, more than a one-sentence distillation could deliver. It’s from farmer-filmmaker Pierre Creton, and his sculptor-filmmaker partner Vincent Barré. They live in the Normandy region of France and they make hybrid fiction–non-fiction films about rural life that give shifting weight to people and animals, to gardens, to sex and the bonds of queerness.
Creton has been working this way for a couple decades now, keeping it small and in the family, so to speak. The films haven’t made deep inroads into the U.S. outside of festivals. His 2023 film, A Prince, was the first to get a U.S. theatrical run through the great Strand Releasing. Now, the small distributor Several Futures has taken on the task of building the North American audience for his catalog. A retrospective of earlier films has gone to some U.S. cities, headlined by 7 Walks.
When hit with that terrible word, “nice,” I want to respond, “But…” as I launch into a too-excited barrage of ideas and information: about the work of the late gay filmmaking legend Derek Jarman, his film The Garden, his book Modern Nature, which is about his life as an artist and his lovingly detailed actual garden; about the indirect line from his work to Creton’s; about the practice of docu-fiction and how Creton’s decision to make literal homemade films with the community of people he knows best – and sometimes with Mathieu Amalric – has resulted in a body of work as thrillingly interconnected as the mushrooms that Mark Brown enthusiastically discusses in 7 Walks.
Or I could lead with the anecdote from the spring 2025 issue of BOMB magazine, an interview with Creton, in which a film festival audience member told him, “I hope you won’t mind my saying so, but your movie really made me want to suck your cock.” As reviews go, that's a juicy red tomato.
The man making the offer had just seen A Prince, where cocks figure prominently. There aren’t many to witness on camera, but when they are seen they're magical, at times fantastical, and analogous to the blooming plant life that dominates so much of the narrative. To get the message across, botanical illustrations are, at one point, superimposed onto a photo of men having sex. Where one form of life ends and another begins is irrelevant. It's all representative of an inclusive, extended community that grows up around a young horticulture student and his many older lovers. Like a garden.
But 7 Walks is exactly what it says it is. In the first half, Creton, Barré, and A Prince cinematographer–lead actor Antoine Pirotte follow Brown on a series of seven walks to look for, look at, describe, explain, and make associations between plants. It's a miniature lecture series by turns scientific, historical and personal, as a flurry of latin names fly by. Taking classroom notes will leave your hand cramped. Better to relax and let it wash over your senses as a first visit with a diligent, focused scientist who finds himself moved by plant discovery, who's made sorrowful by their vulnerability to human-created climate change, and who's happily wistful about the "poetic" times he’s fucked in a field of flowers.
At one point the observation is made that a particular patch of land looks like Derek Jarman’s garden/The Garden. Lots of rocks. Things growing anyway, referencing one of A Prince's early scenes where an unknown hand reaches down into rocks to rescue a tiny palm-sized plant struggling to live there. Everything in Creton's world revolves around that sort of nurture. His formal idiosyncrasies recall the history of art cinema – not just Jarman but Bresson and Straub-Huillet – yet he resists the chilly atmosphere that sometimes attends that history. He routinely produces work with a depth of feeling grounded in expressions of love: for the earth, for flowers, for sex, friends, livestock, dogs, bees, filmmaking, and the generous gifts newcomers bring to a community.
The second half of the film is a return to each location in the same order. This time there's a more or less fixed camera. Brown insists on filming the plants to, in his words, get to their soul, and his hushed narration about the universe underfoot, the miracle of finding things hiding in plain sight, and the impossibly kinetic, unruly nature of nature is as soothing as it is factually overwhelming, a vital deepening of what came moments before.
Distinct, personal, quiet but not still, 7 Walks vibrates with life and hope for continued life. And no, I will not remember the names of these plants but I will keep the feeling, because it's the same feeling that also radiates from A Prince: tranquility, found in a small corner of home.
