Louis Pierrel, Behind the Lens

GAZE INTO IT.

When a student documentary crew decides to interview Julia, a puzzling young woman willing to share her sensitive past, the project grows increasingly uncomfortable for the subject as the director's relentless scrutiny and unethical transgressions soon start to blur the lines between reality and performance.

"Behind the Lens," a hybrid psychological drama, adopts both traditional and experimental approaches to narrative storytelling by shifting between the increasingly-entangled perspectives of fictional and documentary lenses. The short embarks on an existential satire of ethics within filmmaking, where boundaries of the fourth wall, layers of reality and audiences' positionality are questioned at the heart of this personal work. The installation presented here reflects a version of the filmmaker's introspective pieces, in which visitors are invited to take a seat as the director. A script-peppered mirror juxtaposes two cameras and materialises as an asymmetrical representation of the footage shown on them.