Autoportrait, Autoportrait

Simone Fattal

FRANCE

World Premiere

“A young woman named Simone Fattal, as if to discover herself, chooses

to expose herself to the eye of the camera in order to reveal (better than any

miroir?) a part of herself. Simone, without acting, enters into the spirit of the

game of reflection that cinema allows – deliberately choosing to bow to the

imperatives of filming, accepting the evaluations that the confrontation with

the lens might generate and taking the risk (not without a certain justifiable

reticence) of revealing herself to the gaze of others. Simone shows herself,

in all spontaneity, talking about herself, through little touches, snippets

and fragments – freely allowing frankness: uncompromisingly accepting

to submit to this exercise of sincerity and truth, which she imposes and

demands of herself. Because Simone seems to expect, above all, a form of

clarity from this “production” of her own image – the cinema thus becoming

the medium, or rather the special condition for making appear (or better still,

making possible) a reality which only it is able to grasp, to render visible,

according to its own balance of light and shadow. That is why this film is

above all a cinematic quest to see: to see emerge, through the gaze, a part

of the self – the part of the self that doesn’t really belong to us, to the extent

that it is true that we are all a face of humanity, even without knowing it.”

(Eugénie Paultre)