Ballet sincère
2022 · 15m · France
Directed by Nissim Norré
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A film-ceremony about uprooting: the director, who never knew his ancestors' land, builds a temporal bubble where each viewer can remember and consider their own departure.
Picked by Margot
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A film-ceremony sounds like the kind of self-serious conceptual scaffolding that usually collapses under its own weight, but Norré's refusal to narrate or explain—just *build*—actually sidesteps the trap; the temporal bubble becomes stranger and more subversive precisely because it trusts the viewer's own ghosts.
Norré positions *Ballet sincère* in conversation with essay film and durational practice while maintaining formal restraint; the ceremony structure and the filmmaker's absent presence invoke both Marker's essayism and performance art, creating a considered meditation on inherited geography and memorial space.
The decision to make the viewer's own remembering the actual subject—rather than Norré's—is the film; that structural humility, where the filmmaker steps into the frame to *enable* rather than narrate displacement, transforms a conceptual premise into something that actually moves.