Marc Delsaert

"The State of happiness... permanent" presents itself as an extremely composed cine-photo-novel, based on the life of the filmmaker. It is, very exactly, images and sounds extracted from his personal story (curiously mixed with History itself). Not a plan that is not a piece of flesh, a piece of memory, a piece of life. Not a plan that does not fit into the raw experience of Maria Koleva. From this film, I want to highlight two very beautiful sequences: the one where she writes an essay with her cameraman on the back of a man sleeping in his bed, the one where she wonders, based on a photo where we see her as a little girl with her family during some party (in which his father seems to have played an important role), on the hat worn that day by his mother.

Raphaël de Valentin is a tormented, hopeless and penniless young aristocrat. An old antique dealer gives him a sorrowful skin that has the power to grant all the wishes of its owner. But he warns him: with each wish granted, the size of the skin will shrink.