ROOM 826

France | 2024 | 13 min | col.

A film reel pops up in the ancient family home that used to belong to the filmmaker’s great-grandparents. From there begins a personal quest after the mysterious tracks that the images regained suggest. A painting at the Louvre returns with insistence, with its upset faces and dramatic gestures; one cannot not wonder about the filming gaze – the great-grandfather’s governess (and lover). Going back on the thread of these evocative images, Sophie Leclercq ventures into the secrets and the unsaid of a Piedmontese bourgeois family, offering a glimpse into a knot of unresolved relationships marked by class and gender issues. The images conceal as much as they show. Their ambiguous status as visible/opaque allows problematizing the family memory and to explore that which lies behind an apparently trivial representation of an elegant home, a prosperous countryside, a family meal. (m.m.)

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