PÉNÉLOPE

Mother of an autistic little girl, director Claire Doyon decides to try and find
a way to make her child feel better by undertaking a long journey. Together
they travel to the deepest corners of Mongolian Siberia, searching for a
shaman with healing powers. From Paris to the Great Steppe, obviously,
there is quite a difference in setting. In this western-like epic, the city which
only emphasised the child’s suffocating feeling gives way to a huge space
in which her movements, although still signs of pain, or apnoea, suddenly
take another dimension. With her arms and head lifted up to the sky, her
fragile figure slowly seems to blend in the vastness of the bare landscape.
Of course, the archaic rituals to which an impressed Pénélope is submitted
offer no guarantee of efficiency, and the parents are well aware of that. But
they mostly take the trip as a way to try and displace the pain, physically and
geographically, to outstrip it and drown it in an unfamiliar culture. Therefore,
in this portrait of her daughter, Claire Doyon’s images never settle anywhere,
they never merely observe – they rather reveal themselves wholeheartedly,
as images made out of love, surrender, showing a slight lack of balance
which lets the wind of faith shake them in gusts. (JPR)