Je n'embrasse pas les images – Films

Pascal Hamant
France | 2025 | 76 min
World premiere
Language : French
Subtitles : English

A filmmaker wanders with his camera through a large empty house where he spent a happy childhood. Aged 14, he was stopped in his tracks by the terrifying image of his father’s corpse, covered in a white shroud. Thirty years on, he makes his way back to the original scene. This powerful, restrained tale also weaves around the iconic figures of Ayrton Senna and Marilyn Monroe.

At the age of 14, Pascal Hamant is confronted with the most harrowing sight of his life: his father’s lifeless body, lying on a table, partially covered by a white shroud. A blinding, overexposed image, in the photographic sense. Faced with death, he feels the ground give way beneath his feet.
Thirty years later, he is roaming through the empty house that once sheltered a childhood abruptly cut short. It is inhabited by all the other images that have filled the irreparable absence, that have served as a screen. On the film set, the filmmaker flips through his family album, pieces together fragments of his biography, and explores his obsessions with Marilyn Monroe and Ayrton Senna. The narrative, carried by his voice, bends and defies linearity. Addressed to an imaginary therapist, to the lost father, or even to the iconic figures invoked, it spirals around the original trauma.
Je n’embrasse pas les images is thus a cinematic investigation into the realm of the unconscious—a powerful Orphic gesture forging its way from the kingdom of the dead back into the light.
Emmanuel Chicon

Je n'embrasse pas les images, 2025
De l'autre côté, 2014