Three years after Pénélope mon amour (FID2021), Claire Doyon provides news of her daughter, a young adult with autism and non-speaking. She does so through a letter addressed to other parents in charge of a home where Penelope will not be living after all. The letter sets out the reason for this decision: a disagreement over the method of care, i.e. of creation of a community for beings whose deprivation of speech prevents them from expressing their desire. In a reflex learned from Deligny, Claire Doyon questions the good ethical conscience, revealing its normative unthinking and turning the questions on their head: What is a free gesture? What conditions the slightest gesture? What are we lacking to live up to Penelope’s gestures and joy? While on screen, printed over the days on 8mm film, these gestures and this joy, their brilliance magnified by the editing, impose the enigma of their evidence.
Cyril Neyrat