Feu fantôme

Why this strange opening scene in a forest? Why this polished image that borders on fiction? Perhaps we need this threshold to enter a film that is otherwise strikingly direct: a woman spends a night talking around a fire with the man who raped her. It is impossible, then, not to think of the survey in which a majority of women said they would rather encounter a bear than a man while alone in a forest. Here, the filmmaker appears on screen because she is the one who was raped. Yes, she controls the frame, the mise-en-scène, and has a crew around her. But she has no idea what will come of it. Without giving anything away, we can say that intelligence and the deconstruction of language are not enough: yes, her former boyfriend seems to have changed. Yet what turns a person into a rapist is, above all, their lack of empathy for the person they have raped. The inability, even for a moment, to imagine that the other person is someone who is hurting—simply a human being. A film of rare power that belongs to a new era: one in which women claim ownership of their stories rather than being defined solely as victims.

Éva Tourrent
Filmmaker and Tënk France's Artistic Director