Against a black background, a voice in German emerges from the silence, reciting Rainer Maria Rilke's poem I live my life in growing circle. Chimneys smoke above the snow-covered roofs of a small town in northern Germany. Lights on signal life inside the houses. A road separates them from a forest of bare trees surrounding a frozen lake. There, a young woman waits. She wears a long red down jacket down to her feet, and a white fur earmuff. A few shots detail the landscape, and there she is, stripped of her clothes, exchanging a kiss with a stranger, next to a trunk bending over the lake. Pedro Geraldo, discovered via the magnificent Sofia foi (FID 2023), which traced Sofia's mysterious wanderings before her disappearance, paints here a fragmentary portrait of a being uprooted, solitary and isolated. In fixed shots, the downy grains of his DV camera seek as much to fix general views as the expression of this mute character, whose fickle gaze betrays the desire for encounter. His silence contrasts with the echo of the multitude, anonymous conversations mixed with the noises from outside. Melancholy is deposited in touches, and time expands in this painting stripped of any dramatic element, which gives more to feel a state than it delivers a plot; a gentle harshness. Through a subtle play of false connections, Pedro Geraldo blurs the temporality of his film, thus translating the feeling of confusion specific to exile. A feeling familiar to the poet from whom iel draws inspiration: "and I have been filming for centuries; and still do not know: am I a hawk, a storm, or an immense song." Louise Martin Papasian