Xiao Xiaoyue

The powers of love are always at work. But when they do so in an ancient southern Italian town at sunset, they seem just a little more magical.

If we regard wandering as a way of inhabiting a place without claiming ownership or blending into it—a notion still open to question—the inner movement within this wandering, which sometimes feels like stillness, indeed traces an irreversible line toward a gradual dispossession of self. Dispossession in all its forms, yet primarily there is the issue of language. In the short film Le Livre laissé blanc, we explore the protagonist’s conscious journey as she confronts her loss of language within the inner landscape of her wandering. She attempts to remember her lost language or, alternatively, to make the language of the Other her own.