2024 | United States | Short

Life Story

  • English French 10 mins
  • Director | Jessica Dunn Rovinelli
  • Writer | McKenzie Wark, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli
  • Producer | Jessica Dunn Rovinelli

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

We remember Empathy ( FID 2016) and So Pretty (FID 2019) where Jessica Dunn Rovinelli focused in an art of broad, fair, delicate portraiture, to depict other lives contrary to clichés. With Life Story she draws a portrait not of but with the philosopher McKenzie Wark, author of the Hacker Manifesto . This film, where cinematic, human and political intimacy come together, unfolds in a form as short as it is dense to praise all the splendor of a trans body shown in majesty. The means are as simple as they are singular. While we listen to McKenzie read a text written for the occasion, in the form of an address, sharing her thoughts on her life, the political struggles waged, their theoretical issues, Jessica films her in the intimacy of her domestic space, attentive to this body from which this speech carries, assumed as a work of life in its own right. Everything is offered in its nudity in what is most private, therefore most political: a body that is one's own and that one has shaped, a surface and a history, the fruit of what one receives as of one's own will. The challenge is to offer an exercise of the gaze: de-framing, displaced points of view, centrality questioned. A way of putting back into motion what would make the heart of the image in its very principle. The encounter, which is also a political meditation, is punctuated by unpredictable surges of colors (the film, after Marriage Story , is now part of a colorful series). The pure chromatic qualities, which are offered as visual pleasure, parasitize and magnify, transcend the film. Life story , singular and generous, thus suggests the possibility of a gaze as if refurbished, a possible echo of the transition that is depicted there. But perhaps, above all, the possibility of a film as a gesture of love.

Intimacy Political Space Exploration
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