In My Room (Short 2020)

In My Room: Directed by Mati Diop. With Mati Diop, Maji Diop. Shot in her Paris studio during lock-down, a melodramatic home movie playfully blends themes of womanhood, transmission, and freedom, based on recordings of her grandmother.

“A COVID-19 lockdown film, itu0026#39;s hard to tell what this will look like at a different time. Diop turns the format-a commissioned film for a fashion brand-into a meditation on confinement, community and family, setting recordings of conversations with her late grandmother over lockdown diary-style footage of her own tower-block flat and its environs: shots of sunsets, flying birds, neighbours in their apartments at once as gestures to film (Rear Window, the use of natural landscape as corollary or contrast to human habitation and drama) at once resonant and desperately empty, the relentless force of loneliness in the recordings echoed in, commenting on and being commenting on by the footage, yet with a distance established so that the connection feels at once necessary and abstract, natural and forced.”