Oorworm

(French note in attachment)

What happens in the brain when you are depressed, when you have a psychiatric illness? It manifests itself by a chemical disturbance, like a kind of bug.
It was important for me to talk about this theme. This film is about what I experience on a daily basis, depressive episodes, a kind of catharsis.

When I went to Germany to study for three months, there was a word that stuck with me: Ohrwurm (Oorworm in Dutch, I like the repetitive writing of the letter O). This word means having a song in your head, a haunting music that doesn't go away. It is also an earwig, an insect that likes cool, dark and damp places. Its name comes from a myth that they enter into the ear to make a hole in the eardrum.
The parallel between this word and depression was obvious to me. It's there, but it doesn't go away, it eats you from the inside. No one witnesses it, it's invisible, it's inside our head and nothing can make it go away. There is the extreme loneliness, the need for help, for a helping hand. There is the incomprehension of others who do not see the handicap and the suffering.

Shortly before writing the film, I came across a video of animals jumping happily to the music of Henri Dès. You have to know that this french musician marked my childhood. An energetic, joyful music, but so annoying when you listen to it because it stays in your head very easily. It is from there that I proposed to Guillaume Plasse to compose a song on spring with a very fast rhythm, preventing any breathing between verses and choruses, which seems never to end.
In this film, a mysterious character, a kind of man dressed as a rabbit with glitter, is the personification of this childish song. He reminds me of my childhood, what was passed on to me genetically by my parents but also by my life experiences, everything that has led me to be sick today. It was important for me to represent the disease in a visual and sound way, because in everyday life, it affects both the auditory (the parasitic thoughts that go round and round) and the physical (the anxiety, the panic attacks, the OCD, among others).

The film is constructed in three parts:
- a bright and positive first where "they lived happily ever after" could apply. A tale where we are made to believe that if we want, we can, that it is easy to get out of it.
- a central generic, a kind of internal journey, giving to feel this bug that we thought was gone easily but that keeps coming back.
- a third part, darker, which turns into a horrific film because reality is very different from fiction. Yes, depression and psychiatric illnesses can lead to suicide if the person is not helped.

My film is absolutely not an ode to suicide, quite the contrary. If the film is shocking, it is above all to prevent it. The viewer is immersed in the skin of the main character. As we can see, the end of the film opens on a new "attack" of the glitter man, a highlighting of human fragility, and of the tilt towards depression that can affect anyone, a subject not to be taken lightly.

I tried to show what people with mental disabilities can experience in a subjective way, the difficulty to say "I need help" and the important role that the entourage plays in its presence, the words chosen, the listening and the need to say: "yes, you need help and I am here to accompany you".