Sur le fil d'Ariane

We are lured into a maze right from the title, Sur le fil d’Ariane (In Ariadne's thread). This thread was the trick Ariadne invented so that Theseus might enter the maze, kill the Minotaur and find his way out again. We might imagine that the thread here is the line drawn in ballpoint pen over twenty years by Ariane Bergrichter, sketching jumbled, lifelike street scenes as she sat in a café in Brussels. Was this pen line she drew her way of not getting entirely lost in a mental maze inhabited by voices? Is that Ariadne’s thread from the title? Or maybe the thread was the diary that she wrote and that we can hear off-screen, to the point that we almost drown in it? It might be. Although we can also glimpse other threads in the film, such as the threads of the beaded necklaces that we see in the local market. If this thread breaks, the beads fall to the ground and are lost. While this thread holds, those ordinary beads, with no real value as such, form a necklace. The film, short yet jumbled and lively like Ariane Bergrichter’s drawings, is like a necklace made of city maps, of drawings, of voices, of brief accounts which also provide a glimpse of fondness and solitude. A necklace so those beads are not lost. A necklace so a life is not lost. 

Pablo García Canga