6 short films to see this weekend on Arte – Les Inrocks

Six short films particularly caught our attention this week. They are directed by Sameh Alaa, Saïd Hamich, Alexis Langlois, Juliette Saint-Sardos, Antoine du Jeu, Nicolai GH Johansen…

I Am Afraid to Forget Your Face by Sameh Alaa

Palme d’Or at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, I Am Afraid to Forget YourFace follows, for a day, the journey of Adam, forced to disguise himself as a woman to see one last time the face of the one he loves. Concealed under a veil, the boy manages to make his way where the men of Egyptian society are not admitted. Third short film by Sameh Alaa, I Am Afraid to Forget Your Face is a mute and intuitive film that advances with the camera on board without ever verbalizing its issues but with a tenacious belief in its character and in the expression of affects. Mourning film collected in a short duration, encapsulated in a square format, it is also seen as the painful counter-shot of a story of an impeded love and a sacrificed youth.

I Am Afraid to Forget Your Face on Arte.

Departure by Said Hamich

After having filmed the return of a thirty-year-old to his childhood lands in the South-East of France in a beautiful first feature film released in 2018 (Back to Bollene), Saïd Hamich follows this time, in this film which is his first short film, the departure of Adil, eleven years old, who will soon leave Morocco to join his father in France. It is with a beautiful sobriety of features and a very fair modesty in emotion that the Franco-Moroccan filmmaker, a former graduate of La Fémis, manages to capture something of the flow of this time before departure and to inscribe in this daily life which makes the world of Adil the melancholic trace of the memory.

Departure on Arte.

Dorothy’s Demons by Alexis Langlois

In a recent issue, the magazine Court-Circuit d’Arte addressed the theme of Halloween. And what better way to celebrate the disguise and its glittery excess than to dive into the subversively kitsch universe of Alexis Langlois with Dorothy’s Demons, which is also currently experiencing a theatrical distribution? With this new film, the young French filmmaker pushes the satire even further with always a lot of fun. After the war against the cis led by a band of flamboyant trans warriors in Terror my sisters, it is towards another system of oppression that Alexis Langlois turns, who imagines here in the person of Dorothy, played by his sister Justine, beloved actress in his films, a perfect alter ego of a filmmaker who, deprived of a freedom of creation by the funding committees, will not hesitate to undermine its authority by giving life to a deliberately queer cinema, free from norms.

Dorothy’s Demons on Arte.

Inherent by Nicolai G. H. Johansen

Teenage movie and vampire movie have often gone hand in hand (from Twilight at Walrus). The alloy is not new and metaphorizes the beginnings of the changes that adolescence and self-discovery can bring about. Sensual awakening and sexual appetite become bites, bodily fluids smell of blood. With Inherent, presented at Critics’ Week in 2021, Danish filmmaker Nicolai GH Johansen takes up this teen mythology on his own, but in an extremely dry, silent and horrifying film. In this stripped-down and sensory staging, a young blonde heroine wanders through padded and misty landscapes, sets her sights on a young man and seems prevented from living her life by a strange presence sleeping in the attic.

Inherent on Arte.

SuperNova by Juliette Saint-Sardos

With SuperNova, Juliette Saint-Sardos simultaneously paints the portrait of a young girl of today, a bimbo and a goddess of incandescent beauty An easy girl by Rebecca Zlotowski, but also a subtle and elegant theoretical and feminist object on the act of looking and the shift from a state of coveted object to a status of looking. Strolling through the city, a space reserved for men, Sasha is constantly spied on. But as she crosses the heat of the nights and days of Marseilles, her gaze falls on a young man, a handsome erotic angel, who asks nothing of her.

SuperNova on Arte.

The Vacation Friend by Antoine du Jeu

Landing in Paris to reunite with a holiday sweetheart, Aurélien (Quentin Dolmaire) believes he may be able to hold back this fleeting summer weather. But as soon as he arrives unexpectedly, he bumps his head against reality: Fanny, the holiday lover, has a boyfriend and has closed this summer parenthesis well. She still accepts to host the expelled for an indefinite time. With The Vacation Friend, already spotted at Côté Court in June 2020, Antoine du Jeu, former critic at Cinema notebooks, produces a wonderful comedy that captures with great precision and humor the contemporary and uneasy portrait of a certain Parisian youth, chaining roommates and internships, but also something of the state of love feeling and its tiny variations.

The Vacation Friend on Arte.