What is the film about?

A young woman who lives in her thoughts goes back to the sea to centre herself. As she dives into the water, she dives under her skin and penetrates her psychological wrapping.

What influenced it?

Christy Lee Rogers, Susanna Majuri, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Marina Abramovic…

A little background information...

When I first started writing and developing the film, I had strong mental images of water and skin in mind. So I started to experiment around those two bodies -the physical human body and the water body- and tried to find connections between them, and this is how the notion of surface came up. I became familiar with a book from the psychologist Didier Anzieu named the Skin Ego. It states that the skin is the wrapping of the human psychology, and that psychological troubles materialize sometimes through the skin (through acne, eczema etc…).
So the film shows how an anxious woman wants to penetrate the surface of her skin and explore her inner self in order to heal. She dives under the surface of the water to calm down, but in reality she dives deep under her skin.

How was the film made?

The film is mainly a mixture of watercolour animation and live action/pixilation. I used watercolour not only because it seemed obvious to work with water on the making of this film, but also because it allowed me to create abstract images: the colours of the female character mixes up with the backgrounds at some point, as to show how she loses the limits of her own body when she is anxious. In opposition, when she is reconnecting to herself underwater, the image in live action shows a more define and figurative body as she recovers a sense of her identity.