L'Oiseau de la nuit

Queer mermaids in Lisbon… The body, always the body, this “weight of flesh” so visible, that’s not what it seems, that, the more it’s shown the less certain it is… Proclaiming that they’re a different gender, a different species, the friends that Marie films strut and preen in front of the camera. Their pleasure is to be Other, to be disguised, to disappear behind a mask and a bird costume… showing what they would like to be, what they’d like to look like, articulating the difficulty in appearing to be what you want, without being it, but which transforms what you are anyway. Neither one nor the other. Clothes make the man, and when you dress up as a bird, you could find yourself in a museum where even chimeras end up being stuffed. The end of the living body, the beginning of costume… Mortal danger…

Claire Simon
Director