In his image: De Peretti makes a winning return to Corsica [critique]

The filmmaker questions both the strength of commitment and the inescapable power of the present through the journey of a Corsican photographer. Fascinating.

As sure as a photograph has the property of suspending time and thereby creating memory, the cinema image condemned to movement possibly adds an excess of reality. Here and there, life is threatened since what is captured is already no more. The young heroine ofIn his imagethe new feature film by Thierry de Peretti adapted from the novel by Jérôme Ferrari, armed with a camera, strives to take into account only the present, refusing to be ” one more trace “. Her accidental death in the first moments brutally places her in this residue of reality forever frozen. Her burial allows us to reactivate, through flashbacks, a brief but intense life. Antonia was a young girl from the Corsican mountains, in love and independent, constantly caught up in the fires of the island's nationalism that unfolded chaos around her. Becoming a photographer perhaps meant agreeing to be the witness of a commitment that destroys everything. Antonia goes from wedding photography to war photojournalism, without being satisfied with the artifices of truth. Thierry de Peretti has been digging the same furrow since his formidable first feature film, The Apaches (2013) where the notion of belonging (to a culture, a group, a space, a genre…) was already questioned, inducing a nervous floating source of implacable tensions. We may also remember Roschdy Zem at the beginning of his Investigation into a state scandalinvisible to others and to himself. Now death is past…”, we hear here. This magnificent film could also have been called, chronicle of a disappearance.

By Thierry de Peretti. With Clara-Maria Laredo, Marc' Antonu Mozziconacci, Louis Starace… Duration 1h53. Released September 4, 2024