Je suis
2014 · 3m · España
Directed by Gonzalo Alvarado
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative, sensual
Sensuality and personality: a video about oneself and determination, in French, in which a woman affirms that when she feels like laughing, she laughs out loud, and that she loves who loves her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A three-minute French affirmation video could be the most tedious thing alive, but Alvarado somehow weaponizes sincerity itself—turning self-declaration into something genuinely unsettling, almost confrontational in its refusal to wink at the camera.
There's a lineage here: the personal essay film as formal statement, echoing Agnès Varda's essayistic voice and the French New Wave's collapsing of confession and cinema; Alvarado positions himself squarely in that tradition while maintaining a fastidious restraint about what the camera can actually prove.
The entire film hinges on a single sustained choice—maintaining total compositional stillness while the voiceover insists on appetite and freedom—and that tension between formal constraint and claimed liberation is where all the real work happens.