For a long time, Jean-Cosme Delaloye made films that wanted to hurt you. He spent years as a newspaper reporter, then carried that instinct into documentaries about the worst things he could find. A landfill in Nicaragua where a girl with AIDS survived. The kidnapping of girls in Guatemala. A stray-bullet killing in gang-ridden Paterson, just outside New York. He went toward the pain on purpose, and he filmed it the way a reporter would. “I wanted to punch you in the face.”
Then he made a film about techno music, and for once he wasn’t trying to hurt anybody.
The Film That Changed His Mind
Delaloye came to filmmaking sideways. He was a reporter who got a wild assignment inside the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, covering a rodeo for inmates. A Swiss filmmaker read it and called him up: want to make a film? He said sure. That was 2006. The film grew past the rodeo into the story of an inmate serving life for murder, and Delaloye was hooked. The 2010 Haiti earthquake sealed it. He saw things there he couldn’t just write about. He kept reporting for another decade while making films on the side, a double full-time job, until he finally quit the newsroom for documentaries alone.
The turning point came when he saw Tempestad, by the Mexican director Tatiana Huezo. She had made a film about the same subject he had once covered, the kidnapping of girls, and she had done it the exact opposite way. He had wanted to show you the violent death. She built emotion instead. “You want to show the emotions,” he realized. That reframed everything. He stopped making journalistic documentaries that delivered information and started making films that delivered feeling. The camera stopped being his eye and became something closer to his brain.
He puts it simply. A documentary is a jigsaw. Fiction comes with a script and a structure; a documentary you solve as you go, over weeks, with no guarantee the pieces fit. That uncertainty is the part he loves.
Why Carl Craig, and Why Techno
The seed was personal. As a teenager in Lausanne, Switzerland, Delaloye went to a club where the Detroit techno guys came through in the 1990s, big in Europe before they were big at home. Derrick May. Kevin Saunderson. To a kid who had never crossed the Atlantic, Detroit sounded like the strangest, coolest place on earth. Years later, a French TV channel asked him to make a film about a futurist painter. He knew nothing about painting. He pitched Detroit techno instead, because to him that was the sound of the future, and called an old DJ friend for advice. The friend said: do a film on Carl.
Making a film on Carl Craig is like making a film on Prince.
One of the biggest names there is. Craig was interested, and two years ago Delaloye flew to Detroit to shoot what he thought was a teaser. The interview ran long and went deep, and it ended up as one of the main interviews in the finished film. Producers with Cannes and Sundance pedigree signed on. He followed Craig for two years.
The reason techno mattered to him runs underneath all of it. While he was covering those brutal stories, techno was where he went to recover. He’d put on a track and it would carry him somewhere he could digest what he’d seen. So he didn’t want to make a dictionary entry about a genre. He wanted people to feel what goes into music that sounds purely mechanical. Craig says it himself in the film: he brings human elements to drum machines, to something impersonal. There’s blues in it, jazz, funk, rock, punk. One Detroit DJ describes Craig as a cocktail, and Delaloye ran with that.
Party, After Party
The structure got written on a scrap of paper in Ciudad Juárez. Craig had played a set there, sick and exhausted, six or seven hours straight, and it was extraordinary. The next morning Delaloye sat in a café with his director of photography and sketched the shape. Craig had built a museum exhibition called “Party/After-Party,” shown at MOCA in Los Angeles and at Dia Beacon. The film borrows that arc exactly. Pre-party, party, after-party.
You climb for an hour. There’s a music scene about sixty minutes in where Delaloye wants viewers from every walk of life, young and old, to feel like dancing, because by then they understand what went into the sound. Then the last half hour comes down. It’s about what it means to be alone after the night of your life, when you have to wake at 9 a.m. and fly two thousand miles. Craig is in his fifties now, thirty years into techno, and the descent doubles as a quiet look at the after-party of a career. The 1967 Detroit riots sit in the backdrop, the city’s history threaded through the music, the reporter in Delaloye still making sure the context is there.
He also made a structural choice a journalist would resist. When techno crossed to England in 1989, the obvious move was to have the pioneers narrate it. Instead Delaloye used Craig’s mother to tell the story, because her angle was different: my son is barely twenty. She’s so forceful and emotional that the moment blooms past a factual recounting into something better.
Trust the Silence
Delaloye’s method now is patience, and he teaches it to his documentary students in Paris. As a reporter, you lean in hard for the soundbite. In documentary, you set the conditions and wait. You have to be confident enough not to intervene. The trick depends on a good director of photography, someone who’ll hold on a face a beat too long, stay in it when instinct says pull away. When director and DP lock into that rhythm, he says, you start to dance with each other, and the best scenes unfold because nobody rushed them.
Marcus puts it back to him as a question: is good directing sometimes doing nothing at all, at the right time? Exactly, Delaloye says. Real life will happen if you let it. That old “punch you in the face” instinct is gone now, replaced by something he learned the hard way over eight features. When he’s worked with people who have no reason to share their story, survivors of kidnapping and rape who owe him nothing, he learned that you don’t get the story in the first interview. You spend time off camera. You wait days. You miss something today and get something far better five days later. Asked for his best advice, he doesn’t hesitate.
Trust the silence and just be patient. Be patient and be generous.
New York Telling Him Twice
Tribeca means more to Delaloye than a premiere slot, and the reason is twenty years deep. He moved to New York right after 9/11, and one of his first reporting jobs was covering the first-ever Tribeca Film Festival in 2002, founded to show how resilient the city was. He never imagined having a film there. Then in 2020 he did, a Don Quixote story called Harley about a lawyer in his fifties who challenges a young MMA fighter in Brazil to win a woman’s heart. It got into Tribeca, and to Delaloye it meant New York was telling him he was doing something right.
Then the pandemic shut the festival down a week before it opened, the first cancellation in its history, and it crushed the film’s momentum. Tribeca screened it once in 2021, generously, but by then it was an old film and the moment had passed. So this time, with Desire, the joy is doubled. He scheduled everything around getting the full experience he was denied. New York, he says, is telling him again that he’s doing something right. He plans to keep the film independent through the premiere, with a theatrical release the goal, betting on the thousands who dance to Craig every weekend, from teenagers to people in their fifties, to fill the seats. The full conversation, including the Moodymann cocktail metaphor and the Ciudad Juárez morning where the film’s structure appeared on a scrap of paper, is the kind of episode you listen to twice.
