FRIEDA TV

Gerda Frieda Janett Gröger, “born in 1972; star sign: Libra; egg scrounger” lives life on the edge. She ploughs her way through reality with poetic, punk punchlines, leaving no stone unturned (the public space, psychiatric classifications, us). Léa Lanoé's first feature film is a luminous and poignant documentary portrait. That said, once the cinematic subject has been thus categorised, much remains to be said. Frieda TV can’t be reduced to a genre, just as Gerda Frieda Janett Gröger eludes any attempt to be grasped, fixed or defined. Instead, the movie exudes the idea that it’s the main character who depicts herself as she pleases while constantly reminding us, through the discreet and tender presence of the director, that the relationship filmed stems from a primordial complicity. The extent to which Léa Lanoé’s gentleness responds to Gerda Frieda Janett Gröger’s blistering vitality is remarkable. And vice versa. Frieda TV is testimony to a friendship that made cinema an act of mutual recognition, with one agreeing to play the game, the other to make a film. Documented on 16mm or DV and edited hyper-sensitively are sketches and moments of life shared over a long and indefinite period by the filmmaker and her model. Taken as a whole, it respects and firmly espouses the changing identities and variations of intensity that make and unravel Frieda’s daily life. Because she’s made the camera her ally, we’re able to tolerate the directness of her words that expose the violence she’s been subjected to, the personal catastrophes and the states she passes through. And the film thus produces its two-pronged movement: constructing a path to meet her and translating, through its fragmented editing, her states of being. Frieda TV stands at a radiant crossroads that examines with rare finesse our normopathic ways, both individual and collective, of accompanying those we call mad.

Claire Lasolle

Léa Lanoë