Burlington is a fairly arts-forward community, but its 1,000-year-old French sister city, Honfleur, is on another level. Among the Normandy coastal town’s native-born artists is composer Erik Satie (1866-1925), who single-handedly turned classical music on its head. Iconoclastic and deliberately provocative, Satie’s approach to music is still dismissed in some academic quarters but has permeated the wider culture, influencing the likes of John Cage, Brian Eno and Janet Jackson.
Satie caught the attention of another Honfleur son, Bastien Loukia — a graphic-book artist, historian, biographer and, most recently, first-time filmmaker. Loukia, 34, has been obsessed — not too strong a word — with Satie for the past 19 years. He wrote and illustrated the only graphic biography of the composer, Erik Satie: Cinq nouvelles en forme de Poire (Five Short Stories in the Form of a Pear), in 2016. And he recently completed a documentary film, Le Mystère Satie (The Mystery of Satie). On Thursday, October 8, the Burlington-Honfleur Sister Cities Committee hosts a screening at BCA Studios in Burlington.
Loukia will talk about his work after the screening with committee member Fran Stoddard in perfect English, Seven Days confirmed during a recent phone call to France. It will be his first visit to the U.S.
Loukia hasn’t always loved Satie, he said. On a school trip at age 5 to Satie’s family home and museum in Honfleur, Loukia recalled, “I was a bit afraid of this character. His music was very depressive.” But as a teenager, Loukia read a book about Honfleur that included a chapter on Satie in which the author wrote that he hoped one day someone would make a film about him. “I thought, Why not a comic book?”
Loukia left school at age 15 to study painting with Honfleur’s many local artists. He began his first graphic book at the age of 17, moved to Paris at 19, and painted portraits and showed work in galleries in London and Prague while awaiting publication. The book — a graphic-novel adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment — came out in 2019 in eight countries.
In 2024, the English translation of Loukia’s graphic history Honfleur: A Thousand Years of History was published, which is “how he got on our radar,” Stoddard said. The media consultant had visited the medieval port town as part of an effort in 2009 to connect the two cities — a relationship formalized in 2019. Loukia’s book includes a page about Samuel de Champlain, who sailed from Honfleur in 1608 for an expedition that ended in his founding Québec City and bestowing his name on Lake Champlain.
Even a century after his death, Satie is still alive in modern music.
Bastien Loukia
Satie appealed to Loukia not just because of his cultural moment — the graphic artist is drawn to late 19th-century and early 20th-century French culture — but because “he sacrificed himself for his art.” The pianist and composer flouted convention in every aspect of living but especially when it came to music. That resulted in a life of poverty and obscurity; Satie lived his last 30 years as a recluse in a Parisian suburb and for decades after his death, at 59 of alcoholism, was largely forgotten.
Satie’s beginnings were sad, too: His mother died when he was a child, and the family dispersed. Satie was 12, a mediocre student with a few organ lessons under his belt, when his grandmother was found drowned and his father called him to Paris. He studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire under pressure from his family but was booted out twice. He then sabotaged his own military service to live as a bohemian in Montmartre, though only after burning all of his possessions.
While working as a second-string pianist in a cabaret in 1888, 22-year-old Satie started crafting his first — and most famous — compositions, Trois Gymnopédies. The three piano pieces are melancholy, structurally loose and instantly recognizable. Satie’s friend, the up-and-coming composer Claude Debussy, understood the importance of their nonconformity and orchestrated two of them; younger composers Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel later found inspiration in them.
Satie’s iconoclasm led to collaborations with the avant-garde. He wrote the music for Jean Cocteau’s 1917 ballet, Parade, produced by Sergei Diaghilev. In his program notes for the production, poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word “surrealist” to describe the unprecedented style; Pablo Picasso designed the sets and costumes. In 1924, Satie composed the scores for a zany Dadaist production, by artist Francis Picabia, that combined a ballet and a silent film. His music for the film, Entr’acte, is considered one of history’s first synchronized film scores.
Loukia’s book traces Satie’s life in five stages using a different narrator and art-historical style for each. (The title is a riff on the composer’s Trois morceaux en forme de poire, or Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear, from 1903.) The visual styles follow the composer’s life chronologically, from impressionism through Dadaism. “I wanted to show this evolution of the world of art in his lifetime,” Loukia said. Nicolas Seydoux, the octogenarian owner of the Satie museum in Honfleur — and, it happens, a great-uncle of acclaimed actor Léa Seydoux — wrote the preface and partly funded the project.
By the time Loukia took up that earlier writer’s call for a film about Satie, he said, “I knew all the people in Europe who worked on Satie — musicologists, historians, specialists in 19th-century music, critics.” The film, also largely funded by Seydoux, contains “everything I couldn’t tell in the book — interviews, archives, Satie’s music, covers of it by modern bands. The goal was to show that, even a century after his death, Satie is still alive in modern music.”
In addition to interviews and archival footage, Loukia’s animated graphics help tell the story, including a walking figure of Satie modernizing with the decades as he wades ever deeper into a row of piano keys.
During his visit, Loukia will meet with Burlington cultural historian Hugo Martínez Cazón, another obsessive who discovered that French cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière opened their only North American factory in Burlington in 1903. Martínez Cazón found blueprints of the Flynn Avenue building — now the home of Burlington Beer — in 1991 and has been tracing its history ever since. The brothers produced some of the world’s first color photographs there, called autochromes, through a process they invented. Martínez Cazón is hoping to collaborate with Loukia on a graphic book — a perfect fit, he noted, not least because Loukia is an autochrome collector.
Loukia didn’t really listen to Satie while growing up, the filmmaker said, but he has since come to appreciate his works — especially Gnossiennes (1890-1893), a favorite. “Even now,” he said, “the more I listen to it, the more I understand new things.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Mystery Man | A new film on iconoclastic French composer Erik Satie screens in Burlington thanks to a sister-city connection”
This article appears in September 30 • 2026.
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