Official selection
Locarno Film Festival 2022
Vancouver International Film Festival 2022
Calgary International Film Festival 2022
Chicago International Film Festival 2022
Honors
Calgary International Film Festival - Winner Jury Award for Best International Narrative Feature
Chicago International Film Festival - Winner New Directors Competition - Silver Hugo Award
Director
Ann Oren
Writer
Thais Guisasola, Ann Oren
Cast
Simone Bucio, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Bjørn Melhus, Sebastian Rudolph
contact
Oscilloscope Laboratories
Official website
When her sibling suffers a nervous breakdown, the introverted and overwhelmed Eva (Simone Bucio, THE UNTAMED) takes over their job as a Foley artist. Commissioned with creating the soundscape for an antidepressant commercial that features horseback riding, she struggles to give a convincingly animalistic performance. The task obsesses Eva, to the extent she begins to grow a horsetail herself. Between visits to the sanatorium, she wanders the city emboldened by the newfound appendage. Soon, she meets a botanist (Sebastian Rudolph, PELICAN BLOOD) who grows captivated by her equine traits. The affair blossoms into a careful game of submission that mirrors that of the horse and its equestrian, of the obsessive harvester and the unattainable flower.
Shot on lush, otherworldly 16mm, Ann Oren’s breakout PIAFFE is a sensual, kinky, captivating journey into the mind of a woman discovering her body and the world around her. A fetishistic tale of control and artifice, concerned with subverting gender (and genre!) expectations, Oren’s film joins the great fetish objects of cinema: a work at times dizzyingly erotic in terms of plot, but also as a marvel to be looked per se. A delight for the senses, here is a film one is invited to look at — a retro-inflected hall of mirrors composed in deep, lipstick colours, tactile textures, marvelous set and hypnotizing sound design carefully yanked out of time and space. An invitation to look and hear, recalling David Cronenberg as much as Catherine Breillat, Ulrike Ottinger as much as Peter Strickland, it is one of the hidden gems of the last festival season. – Ariel Esteban Cayer
Showings
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