Overview

In Le Je d’Echec, the details are what holds everything together, every shot, sound effect, play of light and mouvement, are serving a complex narration, as visual as it is poetic, which brings us in a uniquely captivating atmosphere at the image of its protagonist. This film invites us to let ourselves be hypnotized by its hybrid timeless feel, entirely shot inside, depicting the portrait of a fractured identity and the questions that come with it, a subject too often swept under the rug.

Leaning on the symbolism and structure of the game of chess, this piece plays with all tools cinema can offer, all of its « possibilities converted into power » as Deleuze put it, to offer a generous and artistic approach to its subject, and a complex sensorial experience. Form and content are linked to mirror the mental journey of this woman, who won’t hesitate to confront her darkest demons, to write them, interpret them, question them, and brings us with her in this internal puzzle, where each pawn, each move are as much keys to access acceptance and liberation of a mental state, again, much too often judged and minimized in a society that leaves little space to psychological differences and the misunderstood.

Here, those themes are exploited at their climax and in their depth, with honesty and poetry, back and forth, to draw the complete and complexe portrait of a woman questioning her I, in the light of her triggers, in the shade of her game.

Director – Philomène Amougou, Pauline Raybaud