Christian Boltanski is one of the greatest contemporary French artists, known the world over. The narrator, who once knew Boltanski, attempts to reassemble the images of a friend he hasn't seen in twenty years. This is the starting point for a kind of investigation in which documents of varying sources are thrown into the file.

From his diary, filmed over ten years, filmmaker Alain Cavalier invites us to a meditation on old age, weakness and death. Made of moments of life, fragments of images, this film composes a mosaic where the spectator is invited to also find his place by himself...

Trying to describe oneself is a movie about representation. How it is possible, through film, to describe oneself and describe others. With the camera as mirror and third eye. At first, a collage-like combination of letter-writing, investigation and journey, something between documentary and feature film. Finally, a portrait of Boris Lehman from 1989 to 1995, part II of BABEL.

In his studio, in his car, Gérald Fox follows the elusive Boltanski who, in his installations, makes use of portraits, newspaper clippings, magazines, family albums. The photographic approach, endlessly recomposed, proceeds by juxtaposition and accumulation. Each shot, framed in black, is lit by visible bulbs, the mass effect restoring the individual: walls of votive images that question the memory, our dark side, the inevitable passage of time, the traces left behind. Between autofiction and reality, Boltanski: artist or maker (of beauty)?

Robert Gardner has known Boltanski since the 1970s, when he invited him to the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard as a visting artist, and the following years since Boltanski has become a major figure in the art world. Gardner and photographer Michael Hutcherson travelled to Paris to make a film about Boltanski and the PERSONNES installation process.