AUTOPORTRAIT

“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)