Україні — слово мужності та світанку / Слава Україні! 🇺🇦

Україні, її синам і дочкам, усім, хто стоїть під відкритим небом, і тим, хто чекає світанку за темними вікнами:

Сьогодні, коли сонце сходить о 5:45 і залишається з вами до 20:20, нехай це довге світло стане нагадуванням: навіть після найдовшої ночі обрій не відмовляється від своєї обіцянки.

Я пишу не для того, щоб сказати вам, ніби страждання має якусь мету. Страх жодної дитини не є уроком. Горю жодної матері не потрібно ставати прекрасним, щоб його почули. Жоден дім, перетворений на руїни, не є лише символом. Біль є болем, а кожне втрачене життя — це згаслий цілий світ.

Але я пишу, щоб сказати: Україно, тебе бачать. Тебе не забули. Твоє життя не є чимось другорядним. Твоє майбутнє не підлягає торгу.

Небо, яке сьогодні над тобою, ніби промовляє власною мовою. Меркурій, що символічно прямує до Венери, говорить про слова, які можуть ставати мостами, — про правду, висловлену з мужністю й співчуттям. Гармонійний зв’язок Марса з Хіроном нагадує про силу захищати те, що поранене, не дозволяючи рані визначати душу. Зв’язок Місячного Вузла з Хіроном нагадує, що скорбота може існувати поруч із ніжністю, а зцілення починається там, де страждання не заперечують і не залишають на самоті.

А протистояння Плутона з Хіроном говорить про глибшу боротьбу: про зустріч із ранами, які історія несла крізь покоління. Такі часи можуть зламати те, що є крихким, — але вони також можуть змусити людство вирішити, що більше ніколи не повинно бути зламаним.

Україно, ти знаєш ціну свободи.

Тож нехай твоя мужність ніколи не перетворюється на жорстокість. Нехай твій справедливий гнів ніколи не стирає людяності інших. Захищай життя, бо життя священне. Захищай правду, бо брехня прокладає шлях до страждання. Захищай своїх дітей, бо їхнє майбутнє належить не війні, а весні, книжкам, музиці, сміху, праці, любові та звичайному диву — прокинутися в безпеці під власним дахом.

А світові за межами України:

Не звикайте до звуку бомб.

Не дозволяйте відстані зробити страждання невидимим.

Дитина в Києві, Харкові, Одесі, Львові, Запоріжжі чи в будь-якому українському селі не є менш дорогоцінною лише тому, що народилася за межами ваших кордонів. Батько, який шукає рідну людину серед руїн, — це не «чиясь чужа трагедія». Мати, яка чекає на звістку, несе в собі ту саму давню людську надію, яку несуть матері в усьому світі: нехай моя дитина повернеться додому.

Нехай багатство стане відповідальністю. Нехай вплив стане захистом. Нехай правда стане мужністю. Нехай співчуття стане дією.

А тим, хто виснажений: вам не потрібно нести завтрашній день уже сьогодні. Дихайте. Тримайте за руку того, хто поруч. Допомагайте пораненим. Годуйте голодних. Говоріть правду. Пам’ятайте загиблих. Захищайте живих. Продовжуйте.

Шевченко розумів, що дух нації живе не лише у її прапорах чи на полях битв, а в її пам’яті, мові, гідності та відмові схилитися перед несправедливістю.

Тож, Україно, бережи свою пісню.

Бережи свою мову.

Бережи свою пам’ять.

Бережи ніжність, яку війна намагалася в тебе відібрати.

Нехай сьогодні вночі світло Місяця лагідно впаде на твою поранену землю. Нехай зцілення, про яке символічно говорять небеса, людськими руками стане ліками, прихистком, справедливістю та миром.

І нехай настане ранок, коли Україна прокинеться не від звуку сирен, а від співу птахів.

Ти заслуговуєш жити.
Ти заслуговуєш бути вільною.
Ти заслуговуєш відбудуватися.
Ти заслуговуєш на мир.

І доки цей світанок не настав, нехай світ пам’ятає:

Україна не просто переживає історію. Україна несе надію людства вперед.

LENA GHIO   

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La Bataille De Gaulle: L'âge de fer au cinéma dès ce 14 août

Bande Annonce

 ENGLISH translation app above

De Gaulle : Résistance — L’obstination comme arme

Il existe des personnages historiques que le cinéma réduit à leur silhouette : une statue avant même que le générique ait commencé. Charles de Gaulle est particulièrement exposé à ce danger. Sa taille, son képi, sa voix, sa raideur, son nom devenu presque synonyme de la France : tout, chez lui, semble déjà appartenir au monument. Le mérite premier de De Gaulle : Résistance, vaste fresque d’Antonin Baudry, est de tenter de rendre à cette statue quelque chose de plus embarrassant et, par conséquent, de plus humain : l’obstination, l’arrogance, l’incertitude et cette forme singulière de génie qui consiste à croire à une possibilité avant que le réel ne lui ait donné raison.

Le film, inspiré de la biographie de Julian T. Jackson, se situe dans l’Europe défigurée du début des années 1940, lorsque la France vient de capituler et que son avenir paraît décidé par d’autres. De Gaulle, général deux étoiles sans véritable armée, gagne Londres avec une idée qui confine à l’hallucination politique : la France n’est pas vaincue parce qu’elle refuse de se considérer comme vaincue. Il lui faut alors transformer cette conviction en puissance. Le pari du film est moins de raconter la naissance d’un héros que de montrer comment un homme s’invente progressivement comme instrument d’une histoire qui, sans lui, aurait pu prendre une tout autre direction.

Simon Abkarian comprend admirablement le paradoxe. Son De Gaulle est imposant sans être infaillible, sûr de lui sans être toujours sûr de sa cause. L’acteur travaille la posture comme une arme : le dos droit, le regard fixe, la lenteur presque cérémonielle des gestes donnent au personnage une dimension comique aussi bien qu’épique. Face à Winston Churchill, interprété avec une superbe rouerie par Simon Russell Beale, cette rigidité devient même une sorte de gag métaphysique. Deux volontés impériales s’affrontent, chacune persuadée d’être la plus lucide, chacune sachant que l’autre est indispensable.

C’est dans cette relation que le film trouve son moteur le plus efficace. Churchill soutient De Gaulle tout en le soupçonnant constamment de mégalomanie ; De Gaulle dépend de Churchill tout en refusant de se comporter comme son protégé. Leur affrontement possède parfois les contours d’une comédie de couple transplantée au cœur d’une guerre mondiale. Mais derrière les joutes verbales se joue quelque chose de plus sérieux : qui a le droit de parler au nom d’une nation lorsque cette nation a perdu son territoire, son gouvernement et, provisoirement, une partie de sa volonté ?

Baudry répond à cette question par le spectacle. De Gaulle : Résistance appartient à cette tradition du grand film historique qui ne s’excuse jamais de vouloir être grand. Chars, batailles, foules, uniformes, radios crépitantes et explosions composent une matière cinématographique volontairement généreuse. La musique de Volker Bertelmann pousse encore cette sensation d’urgence, avec une puissance parfois presque excessive. Le film veut que l’Histoire soit physiquement présente dans la salle, qu’elle fasse du bruit.

Cette ambition spectaculaire n’est pourtant pas ce qu’il y a de plus intéressant. Le film devient véritablement singulier lorsqu’il quitte momentanément le grand homme pour regarder ceux qui, dans son ombre, sont confrontés à des choix dont ils ne maîtrisent ni l’ampleur ni les conséquences.

C’est le rôle de Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, incarné par Florian Lesieur. Âgé de vingt ans lorsqu’il assassine l’amiral Darlan à Alger, ce jeune résistant apparaît comme le négatif photographique de De Gaulle. Là où le général transforme la patience en stratégie, Bonnier transforme l’impatience en action. Là où l’un veut inscrire son geste dans la longue durée, l’autre brûle de modifier immédiatement le cours des événements.

Cette seconde ligne narrative est probablement la plus vibrante du film. Le montage de Rehman Nizar Ali et Katie Mcquerrey fait dialoguer les deux destins avec une intelligence remarquable, jusqu’à donner l’impression que deux films — le biopic monumental et le thriller politique — avancent simultanément avant de se rejoindre. Les scènes consacrées à Bonnier ont quelque chose de nerveux, de dangereux, presque clandestin. Elles rappellent que la Résistance n’était pas une abstraction héroïque mais un monde de décisions prises dans l’obscurité, souvent par des individus très jeunes, avec des informations incomplètes et des conséquences irréversibles.

C’est aussi là que le film touche à une question qui dépasse largement De Gaulle : qu’est-ce que l’action politique lorsque tout semble déjà joué ?

Notre époque aime raconter la Seconde Guerre mondiale comme une époque où les choix étaient plus nets, les héros plus courageux, les compromissions plus facilement identifiables. De Gaulle : Résistance est plus intéressant lorsqu’il fissure cette nostalgie. De Gaulle n’est pas simplement un homme qui « savait » ce que l’avenir réserverait à la France. Il avançait dans le brouillard. Son génie tenait précisément à sa capacité de convertir une hypothèse en certitude collective.

Le problème est que le film, par moments, succombe lui-même à cette connaissance rétrospective. Certains personnages semblent parler comme s’ils avaient lu les livres d’histoire que nous lirons après eux. Les dialogues explicatifs appuient parfois ce que les images viennent déjà de démontrer. L’appel du 18 juin, notamment, n’avait guère besoin d’être accompagné d’une paraphrase solennelle : le cinéma devrait pouvoir faire confiance à la puissance d’un homme qui parle dans un micro et à un pays qui, pour l’instant, ne l’écoute presque pas.

Cette lourdeur n’annule pourtant pas la force du projet. Elle révèle même une contradiction féconde. Baudry veut faire un film populaire, spectaculaire, immédiatement lisible, mais il raconte une histoire dont la véritable matière est l’incertitude. Il veut filmer le mythe tout en montrant l’homme qui doit le fabriquer.

C’est pourquoi le titre Résistance finit par résonner au-delà du contexte militaire. Résister, ici, ce n’est pas seulement combattre l’occupant. C’est refuser la conclusion prématurée. C’est considérer qu’une défaite n’est pas nécessairement une destinée, qu’un rapport de forces peut être déplacé, qu’un individu presque dépourvu de moyens peut parfois modifier l’espace des possibles.

Le film ne demande évidemment pas de chercher aujourd’hui un nouveau de Gaulle. Ce serait même trahir ce que son personnage révèle. De Gaulle pouvait devenir un point de ralliement parce qu’il surgissait dans une situation exceptionnelle où l’enjeu était de maintenir vivante l’idée même d’une France républicaine. Nos crises contemporaines — dérèglement climatique, concentration extrême des richesses, guerres, affaiblissement démocratique, bouleversements de l’intelligence artificielle — ne réclament pas nécessairement un « grand homme ». Elles réclament quelque chose de plus difficile : une imagination politique collective capable de ne pas confondre prudence et impuissance.

C’est peut-être la véritable ironie de cette fresque française. Nous regardons De Gaulle parce qu’il nous paraît appartenir à une époque où les dirigeants osaient encore agir. Mais son exemple suggère une vérité moins confortable : l’audace politique n’est pas toujours une qualité que l’Histoire distribue aux grands hommes. Elle peut être une décision.

De Gaulle : Résistance n’est donc ni un portrait définitif ni une leçon d’histoire parfaitement équilibrée. C’est un film de guerre conventionnel qui trouve sa puissance dans une idée presque subversive : le futur n’est jamais aussi fermé qu’il en a l’air. Baudry filme un homme qui refuse de prendre la défaite pour une vérité métaphysique. Son obstination est parfois ridicule, son arrogance souvent irritante, sa vision parfois aveuglante. Mais elle possède une qualité devenue étrangement rare : elle agit.

Et lorsque le film s’achève, ce n’est pas tant le képi de De Gaulle que cette question qui demeure : combien de fois avons-nous appelé « réalisme » ce qui n’était, au fond, que notre propre renoncement ?

LENA GHIO   

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FANTASIA FESTIVAL 2026 • Be on the lookout for movies • 4- After School

TRAILER

There is a peculiar bravery required to make a comedy that wagers everything on humiliation. Not the polished embarrassment of fashionable cringe, where audiences are invited to laugh from a safe ironic distance, but the raw, escalating indignity of watching a fundamentally decent person become trapped inside an ever-tightening machinery of public disgrace. After School (Straf) understands that humiliation is funniest when it is inseparable from desperation, and that every laugh lands harder when it carries the faint echo of genuine pain. Directors Merijn Scholte Albers and Tobias Smeets have fashioned a comedy that is riotously vulgar, gleefully chaotic, and unexpectedly thoughtful—a film that begins as an avalanche of spectacular bad decisions before revealing itself as an incisive portrait of masculinity built upon performance rather than confidence.

Edwin, played with remarkable precision by Rutger de Bekker, is one of those cinematic protagonists who mistakes goodness for competence. He believes sincerity should naturally command respect, that patience ought to produce authority, and that kindness will eventually be recognized as leadership. Reality has reached a different conclusion. His teenage daughter Bobbie recoils from his suffocating earnestness. His colleagues dismiss him as invisible office furniture. His students view him less as a teacher than as recreational prey. Even his dream of becoming vice principal evaporates with devastating efficiency when headmaster Glenda diagnoses his fatal professional flaw: a "stunning lack of authority."

That phrase becomes the film's gravitational center. It is not merely an insult but a sentence. Edwin spends the remainder of the story trying to discover whether authority can be learned like classroom management or purchased through borrowed swagger. The answer, predictably and hilariously, proves infinitely messier.

The screenplay, written by Albers, Caspar Smeets, and Tobias Smeets, possesses an almost mathematical understanding of comic escalation. Every attempt Edwin makes to reclaim his dignity detonates into consequences far beyond his imagination. A confrontation becomes a vendetta. An act of self-assertion becomes viral humiliation. A feud with adolescent tormentor Bastiaan spirals toward police interrogations, petnapping, and a chain reaction of catastrophes that seem perpetually one terrible decision away from complete societal collapse.

What distinguishes After School from many contemporary comedies is its confidence in momentum. The jokes rarely arrive as isolated punchlines; instead they accumulate like snow sliding down a mountainside until they become an unstoppable avalanche. Each scene remembers the previous embarrassment, weaponizes it, and compounds it with another layer of absurdity. By the final act, the audience is no longer laughing at isolated gags but at the terrifying inevitability of Edwin's increasingly disastrous existence.

Rutger de Bekker delivers an inspired comic performance because he never chases the laugh. Edwin is funny precisely because he remains absolutely convinced that he occupies a serious drama while everyone else has wandered into a live-action cartoon. De Bekker understands that the funniest people are often those least aware of their own ridiculousness. His anxious smile, defeated posture, and perpetual search for approval become recurring visual motifs that reveal a man exhausting himself in pursuit of acceptance that never arrives.

Opposite him, Ruben van der Meer is magnificent as Peter, the foul-mouthed gym teacher whose understanding of masculinity appears to have fossilized somewhere around adolescence. Peter offers Edwin a masterclass in dominance built from aggression, intimidation, and theatrical displays of alpha confidence. Unfortunately, nearly every piece of his advice functions like pouring gasoline onto a kitchen fire. Van der Meer transforms Peter into something richer than comic relief. He is simultaneously mentor, saboteur, and cautionary tale—a man so intoxicated by his own mythology that he cannot recognize the destruction it leaves behind.

The chemistry between the two actors supplies the film with its strongest comic engine. Edwin's desperate need for guidance collides beautifully with Peter's catastrophic certainty, producing scenes that feel like watching someone receive life coaching from a malfunctioning action hero. Their friendship is affectionate without becoming sentimental, exposing how lonely middle age can become when even companionship encourages one's worst instincts.

Perhaps the film's greatest surprise lies beneath its outrageous surface. Hidden beneath the profanity, slapstick, and escalating disasters is an unexpectedly perceptive examination of toxic masculinity—not as a slogan but as a collection of impossible performances. Edwin embodies one failed model of manhood: endlessly accommodating, terrified of conflict, mistaking passivity for virtue. Peter represents the opposite extreme, equating masculinity with dominance, intimidation, and emotional illiteracy. Neither man possesses genuine authority because both confuse identity with performance. One apologizes for existing; the other mistakes volume for strength.

That thematic current never overwhelms the comedy because the filmmakers wisely refuse to announce it. They trust audiences to notice the contradictions without interrupting the laughter for lectures. The result feels refreshingly organic. The social observations emerge naturally from character rather than ideology, allowing the film to remain, first and foremost, relentlessly funny.

The supporting cast contributes enormously to the film's comic ecosystem. Kylian de Pagter-Colin makes Bastiaan more than a stock teenage bully, embodying the casual cruelty of adolescence with unnerving credibility. Raymonde de Kuyper lends Glenda the weary authority of someone who has witnessed too many incompetent adults mistake aspiration for qualification. Around them, teachers, students, and parents create an environment where embarrassment spreads with the efficiency of an infectious disease. The school itself becomes less an educational institution than an elaborate obstacle course designed specifically to expose Edwin's weaknesses.

Visually, the film embraces clarity over stylistic exhibitionism. Tobias Smeets' cinematography favors energetic framing that allows performances to breathe without calling attention to itself. Maarten Ernest's editing demonstrates impeccable comic timing, understanding that a fraction of a second can separate a joke that merely lands from one that detonates. Meanwhile, the sound design by Matthias Hillegeer and Thomas Vertongen subtly amplifies awkward silences and explosive confrontations alike, while Jan Duthoy and Merijn Scholte Albers' score provides buoyancy without insisting upon emotion.

Like many Dutch comedies, After School occasionally indulges in vulgarity that feels more enthusiastic than necessary. Some jokes lean heavily on profanity or bodily absurdity long after the point has been made. Yet even these excesses seem less like calculated provocations than reflections of the film's exuberant personality. It would almost feel dishonest if a story this committed to social catastrophe suddenly became restrained. The occasional overindulgence is simply part of its comic metabolism.

What ultimately elevates After School above disposable entertainment is its generosity toward its protagonist. Lesser comedies would treat Edwin as little more than a punching bag, reducing him to an object of ridicule. Instead, the film insists upon preserving his humanity even as it subjects him to extraordinary humiliation. We laugh at him constantly, but we rarely laugh without also recognizing ourselves inside his yearning to be respected, admired, or simply taken seriously. That emotional undercurrent gives the comedy unusual resilience. Every absurd setback matters because Edwin's desire for dignity never stops feeling authentic.

Comedy is often described as timing, but After School argues that comedy is accumulation. Respect erodes one awkward encounter at a time. Pride collapses through a thousand tiny humiliations before spectacularly imploding. Confidence, the film suggests, is less a personality trait than a fragile architecture constantly threatened by public opinion. Albers and Smeets understand this truth with exhilarating precision, constructing a film that grows bigger, bolder, nastier, and funnier with every successive scene.

In an era when many studio comedies seem embarrassed by the very idea of being unapologetically funny, After School possesses the confidence to pursue laughter with complete conviction. Better still, it remembers that the loudest laughs often conceal the sharpest observations. Behind every outrageous set piece lies a melancholy recognition that adulthood offers no graduation from insecurity; it merely changes the classrooms in which we continue to embarrass ourselves. The result is a rare contemporary comedy that earns its eruptions of laughter while quietly inviting reflection afterward—a film as generous with insight as it is with punchlines, and one that proves the oldest lesson in comedy remains the truest: nothing is funnier than the painful, hopeful spectacle of someone trying desperately to become the person they already imagine themselves to be.

LENA GHIO   

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FANTASIA FESTIVAL 2026 • Be on the lookout for movies • 3- Cherry And Virgin

TRAILER

上記日本語翻訳アプリ

There are films that tell stories about artists, and there are films that think like artists. Masanao Kawajiri's Cherry and Virgin belongs decisively to the latter category. It is not merely a romance between two illustrators tentatively discovering intimacy after years of solitude; it is a film whose every formal gesture seems born from the same restless hand that sketches its characters into existence. The result is one of the most quietly exhilarating animated features in recent memory—an astonishing work whose emotional intelligence is inseparable from its visual invention. Rarely has animation felt so intimately connected to the fragile architecture of human thought.

The premise sounds almost impossibly delicate. Ryo, a thirty-two-year-old erotic manga artist, has never had sex. Ami, a twenty-eight-year-old commercial illustrator and devoted fujoshi, is similarly inexperienced and equally convinced that romance belongs more naturally on paper than in real life. Having matched through a dating app, they meet armed not with confidence but with overexplanations, anxious confessions, and the exhausting self-awareness that accompanies years of imagining every conversation before it happens. One expects embarrassment to become the joke. Instead, embarrassment becomes the language through which love cautiously introduces itself.

That distinction is everything.

Romantic comedies often manufacture tension through misunderstanding, jealousy, or gamesmanship. Cherry and Virgin refuses all three. Kawajiri constructs something far rarer: a romance in which both people recognize almost immediately that they have found someone extraordinary, while simultaneously possessing absolutely no idea what to do about it. There is no arithmetic of affection here, no contest to determine who loves whom more. Their mutual attraction arrives almost instantly, yet certainty proves far less useful than courage. Every scene becomes an exercise in translating feeling into action, and the smallest gesture—a lingering glance, an unfinished sentence, an awkward apology—carries the dramatic weight of a confession.

The film's remarkable achievement is making hesitation feel cinematic.

Silences stretch not because nothing is happening but because everything is happening. Conversation collapses into meaningless small talk, then unexpectedly blossoms into startling vulnerability. Bedrooms are obsessively cleaned before anticipated intimacy. Condoms are researched with scholarly seriousness. Consent is discussed not as an obligatory narrative checkpoint but as an expression of tenderness. These moments could easily become broad comic sketches, yet Kawajiri discovers something profoundly moving within them. Anxiety, in Cherry and Virgin, is not portrayed as a flaw to be overcome but as evidence that another person's feelings matter immensely.

This generosity extends beyond the screenplay into the film's extraordinary visual language. Kawajiri has long demonstrated a singular fascination with artists depicting themselves. His revelatory short A Japanese Boy Who Draws announced a filmmaker capable of reproducing countless drawing styles while revealing personality through every imperfect line. Cherry and Virgin expands that fascination into feature length with breathtaking confidence. Characters appear not as standardized animated figures but as reflections of how they might actually render themselves. Professional polish exists beside childish doodles, expressive caricatures beside precise commercial illustration. Every aesthetic choice becomes another psychological fingerprint.

Animation, here, ceases to function as illustration and becomes cognition.

Few contemporary animated films exploit the medium with such inexhaustible imagination. Visual styles shift effortlessly according to emotional temperature rather than narrative necessity. Split-screen compositions divide vertically as Ami and Ryo occupy parallel emotional states, transforming simple conversations into visual duets. Supporting characters exist within their own graphic vocabularies without ever feeling like stylistic gimmicks. Instead, Kawajiri proposes something quietly radical: everyone experiences reality through their own artistic language. We do not simply see the world differently; we literally draw different worlds into existence.

This constant reinvention never calls attention to itself as virtuosity. The formal playfulness remains deeply tethered to character. Every stylistic mutation clarifies emotional experience instead of decorating it. It is animation behaving with the expressive freedom usually reserved for memory or dreams, while remaining firmly grounded within ordinary human interactions. One leaves the film wondering why so much contemporary animation confines itself to visual consistency when inconsistency can become such an eloquent emotional instrument.

Perhaps the film's boldest narrative decision lies in its age. Romantic coming-of-age stories have conditioned audiences to associate first love, first sex, and first vulnerability with adolescence. Kawajiri quietly dismantles that assumption. Ami and Ryo are adults carrying years of accumulated self-consciousness, professional responsibilities, and private disappointments. Their inexperience has calcified into identity. They no longer fear merely rejection; they fear confirming every suspicion they have ever entertained about themselves.

That shift transforms what might have been a charming premise into something genuinely profound.

There is a particular loneliness unique to adulthood, when the milestones everyone else seems to have effortlessly crossed begin to resemble locked doors. Cherry and Virgin understands this without indulging either self-pity or easy reassurance. Its compassion emerges through observation rather than sentiment. Kawajiri recognizes that loneliness often survives not because people fail to meet one another but because they become fluent in imagining reasons they should never have been loved in the first place.

Yet despite these melancholy undercurrents, the film remains consistently, almost miraculously funny. Its comedy emerges from precision instead of exaggeration. Oversharing becomes both horrifying and endearing. Self-criticism reaches absurd levels while remaining painfully recognizable. Ami proves every bit as socially bewildered as Ryo, gently dismantling expectations that one partner will naturally become the emotional guide. Their mutual awkwardness creates not imbalance but harmony. Watching them stumble toward one another resembles observing two cautious dancers who have forgotten every step except sincerity.

Kawajiri's direction deserves particular admiration for its patience. In an era increasingly addicted to acceleration, Cherry and Virgin trusts duration. Emotional beats are allowed to breathe without becoming indulgent. Jokes linger just long enough to reveal sadness beneath laughter. Romantic momentum develops through accumulation rather than escalation. The film understands that intimacy is rarely built through grand gestures. More often, it arrives disguised as repeated acts of careful attention.

This patience gives the final emotional movements an uncommon force. The film ultimately argues that love is less about transformation than permission—the permission to remain strange, anxious, uncertain, and unfinished in another person's presence. Confessing love matters, certainly. Discovering that love is returned matters immeasurably more. Kawajiri locates extraordinary beauty in that reciprocal recognition, in the miraculous realization that someone has seen every awkward sketch you made of yourself and decided the drawing was incomplete rather than incorrect.

It is difficult to imagine Cherry and Virgin existing in any medium besides animation. Live action could reproduce the dialogue and situations, but it could never externalize interiority with such effortless grace. Kawajiri understands animation not as an alternative to reality but as reality's invisible layer—the emotional geometry beneath observable behavior. Every frame demonstrates an artist exploiting the medium not because it can do anything, but because it can do precisely what this story requires.

When critics speak about films that justify animation as an art form rather than a genre, the phrase often feels obligatory. Here it feels inadequate. Cherry and Virgin does not defend animation; it expands its possibilities. It is romantic without fantasy, hilarious without cruelty, intellectually playful without self-conscious cleverness, and emotionally devastating without ever raising its voice. Above all, it possesses that rarest quality in contemporary cinema: it leaves one feeling that no other filmmaker could have made it, and no other medium could have contained it.

Some films entertain. Some illuminate. A precious few quietly recalibrate the way we understand what cinema can express. Cherry and Virgin belongs unmistakably among the last category. It is one of the year's finest films, one of the most inventive animated features of the decade, and a work of such abundant imagination and emotional generosity that it seems to redraw the boundaries of the romantic comedy itself. Like the tentative lines of an artist searching for the perfect contour, it discovers that the deepest truths are often found not in confidence, but in the trembling hand that keeps drawing anyway.

LENA GHIO   

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Lena Ghio’s Transdisciplinary Artistic Research

 

“My artistic practice has always been guided by a fundamental curiosity: how do we perceive reality, and how much of reality remains invisible because of the limitations of our senses?”

My work is transdisciplinary because it occupies the borderlands between visual art, empirical observation, and philosophy. It investigates how matter organizes information and whether nature contains forms of perception that bypass biological sense organs.

The research began unexpectedly. While creating installations involving water, glass, light, and color, I discovered recurring visual phenomena captured within my photographic documentation. What initially seemed like a technical anomaly evolved into a systematic, multi-year investigation into the conditions under which these forms emerge.

Among these observations, the most striking involved instances where scrying photography captured visual configurations that later manifested directly in my actual life—providing precise visual prefigurations of future events before they occurred. These results challenged the boundary between the observer and the observed, suggesting that water can act as an active mirror for non-local information.

Rather than claiming a solved mechanism, my work proposes a hypothesis: awareness, intelligence, and information-processing qualities may not be limited exclusively to biological brains, but may exist in subtle, distributed forms.

Art has historically served as an exploratory tool for realities before formal science has the vocabulary to name them. By using photography and installation as instruments of inquiry, my practice invites a dialogue between disciplines—using the rigor of documentation to explore the outer edges of perception, and reminding us that reality is far stranger, and more deeply interconnected, than our materialist models suggest.

MORE on my SUBSTACK

LES CONVIVES @ Galerie Deschênes > 29 août 2026

L'artiste Maxime Goldstyn avec les oeuvres Oeuf au plat, darne de saumon et petite caille, porcelaine, 2022 et Le double, huile sur toile, 2026; à la Galerie Deschênes 

 

ENGLISH translation app above

À table, entre désir et répulsion 

Les convives, de Maxime Goldstyn, à la Galerie Deschênes 

Commissariat : Mathieu Deschênes

Il y a quelque chose d’immédiatement familier, et pourtant profondément inquiétant, dans Les convives, la première exposition de Maxime Goldstyn consacrée au thème de la table et de la nourriture. Présentée ce mois-ci à la Galerie Deschênes, l’exposition réunit des peintures et des objets qui prennent le repas comme point de départ pour sonder ce qui, dans nos rapports aux autres et à nous-mêmes, relève à la fois du désir, du dégoût, de l’appétit et de la mémoire. Sous le commissariat de Mathieu Deschênes, l’ensemble se lit comme une petite mythologie domestique, où le repas n’est jamais tout à fait innocent.

Manger est l’un des gestes les plus ordinaires de l’existence, mais aussi l’un des plus chargés de conventions. La table à manger constitue depuis des siècles un théâtre social : on y accueille, on y négocie, on y célèbre, on y transmet des règles et des récits. Le repas familial a longtemps été un rituel quotidien structurant, associé à la communauté et à l’intimité. Or, ce rituel s’est progressivement transformé. La table demeure, mais elle n’est plus nécessairement le centre de la vie collective. On mange seul, devant un écran, sur le coin d’un comptoir ou dans la rue; les repas sont livrés, photographiés, commentés, consommés à des heures qui ne coïncident plus forcément avec celles des autres. Même lorsque nous nous réunissons encore autour d’une table, le geste porte désormais la mémoire de ce qu’il a été et l’incertitude de ce qu’il deviendra.

Poisson pour trois, huile sur bois, 2026

C’est dans cet espace entre le rituel ancien et ses métamorphoses que Goldstyn installe son univers.

En entrant dans la petite galerie de la rue d’Iberville, la première impression est celle du bois. Le matériau impose une chaleur presque rustique, qui contraste avec la palette sombre des œuvres. Les formats relativement petits invitent à une observation rapprochée, comme si le spectateur devait lui-même s’approcher de la table pour comprendre ce qui s’y joue. Rien ici ne cherche l’abondance spectaculaire. Au contraire, la retenue des compositions donne aux aliments et aux objets une présence presque fétichiste.

Dans Oeuf au plat, darne de saumon et petite caille, réalisé en porcelaine en 2022, la nourriture cesse d’être seulement nourriture. Elle devient objet, dépouille, souvenir ou symbole. Même chose avec Jambon à l’ananas, également en porcelaine : le titre évoque immédiatement une association familière, presque kitsch, tandis que la matérialité de l’œuvre la fait basculer ailleurs. Goldstyn semble constamment jouer sur cette oscillation entre ce qui nous attire et ce qui nous répugne.

De gauche à droite: Jambon à l'ananas, porcelaine, 2022; Figue, choux, pois, porcelaine, 2026; Épis de mais, asperges, trognon de pommes, porcelaine, 2026

Les œuvres récentes sur toile prolongent cette ambiguïté. Poisson pour trois, Faire chabrot et Les convives donnent à la nourriture une dimension presque cérémonielle. Dans Le double, la peinture paraît quitter le registre strictement alimentaire pour toucher à quelque chose de plus psychologique : ce qui est posé sur la table devient le reflet de celui qui regarde. La nourriture agit alors comme un miroir imparfait de nos pulsions.

Cette mythologie personnelle constitue sans doute la force principale de l’exposition. Goldstyn ne cherche pas à illustrer la nourriture de manière descriptive. Elle en prélève les codes — l’aliment, le couvert, le partage, l’abondance, la chair — pour construire un vocabulaire visuel où le familier devient légèrement étrange. Les Épis de maïs, asperges, trognon de pommes en porcelaine participent de cette logique : le repas est là, mais quelque chose semble déjà avoir eu lieu. Ce qui reste sur la table raconte parfois davantage que ce qui y est servi.

La maîtrise technique est évidente. Les surfaces, les textures et les matières sont travaillées avec suffisamment de précision pour que l’idée ne prenne jamais le dessus sur l’objet. La porcelaine, en particulier, introduit une tension intéressante : matière délicate et durable, elle transforme des aliments périssables en vestiges. La peinture, elle, permet à Goldstyn de donner à la table une atmosphère plus sombre, presque théâtrale.

Faire chabrot, huile sur toile, 2026

Le titre Les convives finit par apparaître comme une question plutôt qu'une affirmation. Qui sont-ils, ces convives? Ceux qui partagent réellement notre table, ceux qui nous ont précédés, ceux que nous imaginons ou encore les figures intérieures qui peuplent nos propres rituels? À l’heure où le repas commun est soumis aux transformations de nos habitudes sociales, Goldstyn rappelle que manger ensemble demeure un geste fondamental — précisément parce qu’il nous oblige à être présents les uns aux autres.

Ainsi, sous son apparente simplicité, Les convives parle moins de nourriture que de présence. La table y devient le lieu où le désir rencontre la répulsion, où l’intime rencontre le collectif, où le souvenir rencontre le présent. Une exposition modeste par ses dimensions, mais cohérente dans son propos, qui réussit à faire d’un geste quotidien une scène de notre mythologie contemporaine.

Les convives, huile sur toile, 2026

Visite sur rendez-vous, contactez : https://www.mathieudeschenes.com/

LENA GHIO   

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FANTASIA FESTIVAL 2026 • Be on the lookout for movies • 2- Spacetime Chronicles

TRAILER

Spacetime Chronicles: Folding the Universe into Paper, Memory, and Fate

There is a peculiar freedom that belongs only to filmmakers who have spent years serving other people's visions before finally daring to articulate their own. It is the freedom to abandon convention, disregard market logic, and embrace obsession without apology. Stefano Bertelli's Spacetime Chronicles is precisely that kind of film: an unapologetically personal work that feels less like a screenplay than a mind slowly unfolding itself. It is not merely an animated feature assembled from thousands of sheets of paper—it is a handcrafted cosmology where every crease becomes a wrinkle in reality.

Running a concise yet psychologically expansive 71 minutes, Spacetime Chronicles resists almost every expectation audiences bring to contemporary animation. It has little interest in narrative clarity, commercial accessibility, or emotional manipulation. Instead, Bertelli constructs a labyrinth where memory, physics, dreams, existential dread, and romantic longing collapse into one another. The result is both exhilarating and frustrating—a film that frequently sacrifices coherence for sensation, yet rarely loses its hypnotic grip.

From its opening moments, ordinary causality ceases to exist. A passenger aircraft tumbles from the sky. A black hole disgorges geometric black cubes. A student named Fred boards a bus while reality already appears fractured beyond repair. Soon he is vomiting an emerald-green liquid that becomes an impossible river, an image recalling Stanley Kubrick's The Shining while simultaneously establishing the film's own surreal vocabulary.

Nothing afterward follows recognizable dramatic logic. Fred drifts through examinations, alternate realities, Tokyo streets, cryptic encounters, philosophical conversations with a sunglass-wearing feline manifestation of his conscience, and an elusive romance suspended somewhere between destiny and impossibility. Time loops. Spaces merge. Endings dissolve before they can arrive.

The temptation is to call the film confusing, but confusion is merely its surface texture. Bertelli is pursuing something far more elusive: the emotional experience of uncertainty. Few recent independent animated films embrace ambiguity with such confidence.

The screenplay draws from a remarkable constellation of influences. Einstein's theories of spacetime, Stephen Hawking's work on black holes, determinism and randomness, dystopian science fiction, aviation disasters, psychological thrillers, and cult films such as Donnie Darko coexist within the same imaginative ecosystem. Lesser filmmakers often mistake references for originality. Bertelli avoids that trap because his influences never function as decorative quotations. They become raw materials folded together into something unmistakably his own.

There are moments when the film threatens to buckle beneath the weight of its philosophical ambitions. Characters occasionally serve more as vessels for ideas about consciousness, entropy, and destiny than as fully realized dramatic individuals. Conversations can resemble fragments of an unfinished metaphysical essay rather than natural exchanges.

Yet these imperfections ultimately strengthen the film's identity. One never senses that Bertelli is trying to impress his audience. Instead, he appears to be wrestling publicly with questions that genuinely haunt him. The narrative fragmentation feels born from necessity rather than affectation, and that sincerity is difficult to manufacture.

Visually, Spacetime Chronicles achieves something extraordinary. Paper has rarely appeared so alive. Comparisons to South Park's original cut-out animation or Michel Gondry's handcrafted aesthetic are inevitable, but Bertelli pushes the medium into remarkably cinematic territory. His paper worlds possess both tactile fragility and surprising scale. Airplane interiors feel convincingly enclosed. Tokyo neighborhoods pulse with architectural detail. Escalators glide, sushi restaurants bustle, and Eighties arcade imagery flickers with nostalgic precision. Everything exists as paper, yet nothing feels miniature.

Even more astonishing is Bertelli's command of movement. Traditional stop-motion often embraces stiffness as part of its charm. Bertelli instead develops a hybrid visual language that combines stop-motion with extreme slow motion, producing sequences of startling dramatic force. Explosions bloom like frozen sculptures. Aircraft cabins rotate through impossible silence while loose objects drift weightlessly across carefully illuminated interiors. These moments exist somewhere between handcrafted animation and dream photography. One gradually forgets that every object has been cut, assembled, animated, and photographed by hand. The craftsmanship disappears precisely because it serves emotion rather than spectacle.

That emotional landscape is dominated by anxiety. Fred's inability to complete his journey toward human connection—particularly his pursuit of the woman who relocates to Tokyo—echoes larger questions about whether our lives are governed by choice, randomness, or mathematical structures beyond comprehension.

The recurring airplane imagery reinforces this beautifully. Commercial aviation represents perhaps humanity's greatest illusion of control: meticulously engineered systems navigating chaotic atmospheres where catastrophe always remains statistically possible. Bertelli transforms that metaphor into the governing principle of the entire film. Every character seems suspended within invisible turbulence, uncertain whether they are steering their lives or merely enduring predetermined trajectories.

Even the decision to construct everything from paper acquires symbolic resonance. Paper bends. Paper tears. Paper burns. Paper remembers every fold. Its fragility mirrors the instability of identity itself. Memories warp. Relationships crease under pressure. Entire realities threaten collapse with the slightest disturbance. Bertelli never explains this symbolism because the medium communicates it instinctively. Few films achieve such harmony between material and meaning.

The score deepens this atmosphere of suspended existence, hovering between intimacy and cosmic melancholy. Rather than directing emotion, the music behaves like weather, surrounding Fred's inner world with quiet inevitability.

Not every artistic gamble succeeds. The screenplay's nonlinear architecture occasionally undermines emotional momentum, while some philosophical exchanges—particularly those involving Fred's feline conscience—become repetitive. Viewers seeking conventional character arcs or neatly resolved mysteries will almost certainly leave dissatisfied.

But demanding conventional storytelling from Spacetime Chronicles misses its purpose. This is cinema operating according to dream logic rather than dramatic architecture. Dreams rarely explain themselves. They resonate.

What ultimately distinguishes Bertelli's feature from countless independent passion projects is its sincerity. Nothing here feels manufactured for festival attention or algorithmic approval. Every frame communicates years of accumulated experience in music videos, experimental filmmaking, handcrafted animation, and technical innovation, finally converging into an intensely personal artistic statement.

The film also quietly argues for the continuing relevance of independent animation in an era dominated by polished digital uniformity. Bertelli demonstrates that imagination remains cinema's greatest special effect. Armed with paper, patience, mechanical ingenuity, and uncompromising conviction, he constructs universes that productions with exponentially larger budgets could scarcely imagine.

Spacetime Chronicles will undoubtedly divide audiences. Some will perceive only narrative opacity and surreal excess. Others will discover one of the year's most singular cinematic experiences—a meditation on time, consciousness, and fragile existence disguised as a paper-crafted science-fiction odyssey.

Its imperfections are undeniable. So is its originality.

Like the folded paper worlds it painstakingly assembles, Bertelli's film is delicate enough to collapse under skeptical scrutiny, yet resilient enough to linger long after its final image fades. It leaves behind not answers but sensations: the unsettling awareness that reality itself may simply be another handmade construction, beautiful precisely because it can come apart at any moment.

In an age when so much cinema feels engineered by committee, Spacetime Chronicles stands as a rare reminder that genuine artistic vision often arrives rough around the edges, carrying with it the unmistakable fingerprints of the person who made it. Those fingerprints, pressed into thousands of sheets of paper and countless impossible dreams, transform Bertelli's remarkable debut from an intriguing experiment into something approaching cinematic poetry.

LENA GHIO   

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