De songes au songe d’un autre miroir

Editor: Yuyan Wang

Berlinale Generation

Spanish première

I tried to tell a story without images through images, but I think I will never succeed because their story is outside of my story.

How does one imagine without images? What are the dreams of people who cannot see like? How can they dream geometry or colours? How can they conceive in their mind of a concept like our reflection in a mirror, so abstract, so cold, so slippery? "My hands are my mirror; it's my fingers that give me my reflection", says a little girl. Lewis Carroll's Alice wondered, "And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?". What must it be like to read that in Braille? We don't know, because we can't cross to the other side of the mirror. We can't imagine her Wonderland without pictures, because we have a different concept of "wonders": "My Wonderland is full of soft textures and there are lots of nice sounds, like the birds I can hear singing, and even the texture of cool grass beneath my head. This is my Wonderland; it's not much, but it's all I need".

At a sensory education centre in Lille, northern France, artist Yunyi Zhu takes his camera to some blind girls to try to understand, through the art of images, what a world without images is like, Precisely because it's an impotent tool, film might be the ideal tool to introduce is to an imperceptible perception, unreachable for those of us who can see, because it places us at a disadvantage, in the place of otherness: as one of the girls says, her story goes beyond our narrative.

Miguel Zozaya