Au pays des esprits (2009)

"What can you do with a daughter who dreams of being your son, who transforms herself before your very eyes, yet without you?" In the form of a letter written to his father, Rémy Huberdeau tells his own stories with the help of archive footage from the Twenties. Indeed, how to express the hidden secret that has been gnawing at him since he was nineteen, his voyage through no-man's land between two territories, two sexes while echoing the interwar period? Endowed with a function that is alternately evocative and repetitive, these archives focus more on expression than on determination: a speeding train that hits the screen, women and men at work, an old "survivor of the Resistance" who fascinates the filmmaker, or images that evoke division, such as a double procession of men separated by an empty stretch of land. Punctuated by a vaguely tragic soundtrack, "Au pays des esprits" pursues a simple goal: finding a home close to that which one loves, like the little shack that appears at the beginning of the film and at the end, just before the filmmaker re-assumes the quest of his identity.