Parcours de l’Art, Avignon
« Only Fems » explores the hidden desire of straight men for forms of femininity present on dating apps such as Grindr. Through audio recordings – the anonymous voices of Cristiano’s hook-ups – the video reveals a fetishised, shameful attraction marked by sexism and fear. Part diary, part audio confession, part visual contemplation, « Only Fems » questions our relationship with desire, gender, screens, and the violence of fantasy when it leaves no room for love.
By what grace, still shrouded in relative darkness, does a hand come to wrest a few grains of light from the shadows?
What might seem here like a strange raising of a curtain offstage, without dialogue, says everything about a final act on the threshold of tragedy. And if we think we are watching a haunted descent, what emerges are gestures performed in a time of abandonment. This is the beauty of Younès Ben Slimane’s *We Knew How Beautiful the Islands Were*: with no sound other than the wind, punctuated by the crackle of fire and the scraping of a shovel against dry earth in an improvised cemetery, we can make out the outlines of an elegy in which every shot is a chiaroscuro tableau.
Captivating in its austerity, which silences the pathos associated with the tragedy of migration, this documentary, only faintly inflected with fiction, works in low light and asserts certain features that its nocturnal staging seeks to bring into sharp relief.
Excerpt from a text by Adnen Jdey on Nawaat, 2022.