Put(in)Love
2014 · 14m · Czech Republic
Directed by Eirini Karamanoli
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
In Sochi during the 2014 Winter Olympics, Zhenja, a trans member of a men's swim team who endures daily harassment, decides one day to present openly as a woman at the pool — and meets reactions ranging from admiration to a violent beating.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Karamanoli does something genuinely perverse here—she plants a quiet act of self-determination in the most hostile possible setting and lets the film sit in the wreckage without flinching or preaching. It's satire that doesn't need to wink because the real world is already obscene enough.
The film inherits a lineage of structuralist provocation—Bresson's economy of gesture, Tsai Ming-liang's patience with social rupture—and deploys them with surgical precision to interrogate how bodies become legible or illegible in public space. The editing restraint is its argument.
The masterstroke is the decision to keep Zhenja's face largely composed through the escalating cruelty—one small, held moment of dignity that refuses the camera's invitation to confirm suffering, which somehow makes every subsequent act of violence hit harder.
Reviews
La plus grande prouesse de ce film est de maintenir jusqu'à la fin la confusion sur le sexe d'origine du personnage principal... Ce qui fait de ce film un film de cinéma, c'est son détournement des codes avec lesquels Eirini Karamanoli joue assez justement pour un premier film.