当我是独裁者

Once a common medium to record home movies and holiday souvenirs, the memory of Super-8 film is now disappearing fast. Yaël André has recycled a wealth of random Super-8 footage into a fake biography, with a cheeky off-screen voice. There are only two protagonists in this film, and both remain invisible. There is the narrator, who addresses us in a confidential tone. And there is ‘George’, his imaginary friend. But there are many more personae: the imagined lives of a an adventurer, a psychopath, a perfect mother, an accountant and an invisible man... Although the film appears divided into short thematic chapters, its real strength lies in the associative flow that guides us along a surrealist chain of thoughts, hypotheses and dreams. In the images, the decades from the 1940s to the present day appear all mixed up. Yaël André’s storyline and editing technique make us see these anonymous and quite generic home movies with a fresh eye, as if they were the first of their kind. The combination of text and images results in a bizarre meditation on truth and fiction, life and death, grief and joy.