Create; Survive

How can you make a film when you can barely eat?

This is one of the reflections shared in this short documentary. We follow artist Alex Anna as they present their previous film Scars at the Trouville-sur-Mer festival. Between red carpets, polite small talk, intimate thoughts, and silent breakdowns in solitude, they quietly endure what the outside world doesn’t see: depression.

This is a work that aims less to explain than to make the viewer feel. The editing becomes a fractured mirror, an essential tool to confront the disconnect between the world and one's inner experience. It reveals the impossibility of inhabiting the present moment, layering the roles we perform over the internal chaos we silence. Alex Anna and editor Valérie Tremblay craft a boundary-pushing film, where animation, on-screen text, silences, and stillness held in real time breathe life into this vulnerable story. There are also on-screen inserts of text messages, stories, and selfies scattered throughout the film like a fake diary, an attempt to exist in the game of representations. 

These elements contrast with the image, expressing the internal tension of the artist — all smiles amid crowds or kind-hearted award-givers. Those smiles echo what we know lies off-screen: loneliness, illness, the mourning of one film, the birth of another, creative doubt. It takes trust to reveal oneself without fear of judgment; the artist and the editor, close in real life, weren’t afraid to drop their masks together. A clear-eyed exploration of the contrast between what we show and what we live — and of cinema as a possible space for truth. The need to create becomes deeply meaningful. The work came together gradually, in sync with Alex Anna’s own healing — an organic timeline woven into the creative process itself, a film as fragile and shifting as life itself.

Emma Bertin
Film editor

Presented in collaboration with