PLUME (Feather) tells the story of my daughter when she was suffering from anorexia. During a whole year, as if I was keeping a diary I filmed the moments when we could connect with each other. We achieved that connection through body language.As far as I was concerned, I kept moving constantly, turning around her body and her face in an attempt to get closer to her imprisoned soul, filming her skin and her hair. More recent pictures combine with these visual testimonies of the past in a way as to make it impossible to discern past from present.Texts pasted up on the walls of the room describe the film-director- mother's agony or of measurements, so characteristic of the obsessional world of the disease, as well as the erratic account of days. Purposely, the film is without any spoken dialogues in order to focus on the stream of consciousness conveyed by the pasted texts and by pieces of electroacoustic music created specially for the situation by Jean-Marc Manteau. Unlike the text, which conveys the film maker's point of view, the music conveys Plume 's inner life, focussing more particularly on the expression of lightness through tones connected to breath, water and cristal. The first half of the film takes place indoors, creating important physical closeness as opposed to the mental isolation of the adolescent. The second half shows a series of walks in the open, looking like so many repetitive wanderings. Exterior and interior shots alternate,thus making a dialectical tension between externality and internality.
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