A journey through Paris by night with a sister and a brother suffering from Asperger’s. A secret complicity. She invites him into her world and he invites her into his world. What does it mean to be “related” when there is no conventional language?
This film is a response to my need to understand the mystery I grew up with, namely my brother, someone whose perception of the world, linked to his Asperger’s, was very different and who exerted such a deep and decisive influence on the way I see things. The experience of autism is not expressed solely in the encounter with a different and unfamiliar kind of behaviour, but also contains the idea of an imbalance that works its way into one’s own internal make-up: the emergence within oneself of another way of living. It is said that autistic people live between the earth and somewhere else. Through their very existence, they call into question the certainties of how most people see things, opening up a path to the invisible. People who have grown up alongside them develop the same sense of being “in-between,” of being suspended between normality and autism. It’s relationship between two beings located on the frontier between several states, each evolving in their own way on the margins of several worlds. The question of relations then hinges on the porousness of the gap, a passage that can be taken or not taken.