Pénélope
Claire Doyon
2012 - 43 min - 5D - Couleur - France

"Mother of an autistic little girl, director Claire Doyon decides to try and find a way to make her child feel better by undertaking a long journey. Together they travel to the deepest corners of Mongolian Siberia, searching for a shaman with healing powers. From Paris to the Great Steppe, obviously, there is quite a difference in setting. In this western-like epic, the city which only emphasised the child’s suffocating feeling gives way to a huge space in which her movements, although still signs of pain, or apnoea, suddenly take another dimension. With her arms and head lifted up to the sky, her fragile figure slowly seems to blend in the vastness of the bare landscape.
Of course, the archaic rituals to which an impressed Pénélope is submitted offer no guarantee of efficiency, and the parents are well aware of that. But they mostly take the trip as a way to try and displace the pain, physically and geographically, to outstrip it and drown it in an unfamiliar culture. Therefore, in this portrait of her daughter, Claire Doyon’s images never settle anywhere, they never merely observe – they rather reveal themselves wholeheartedly, as images made out of love, surrender, showing a slight lack of balance which lets the wind of faith shake them in gusts." (Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID 2012)