Mademoiselle Kenopsia

Behind the walls of the desolate, empty rooms of an unidentified non-place (it could be an inn, a school, a church, or anything designed to accommodate strangers), a woman tries to carry out an abstract mission with the utmost dedication: Surrendered to her obsession to inhabit interior spaces, sometimes as a custodian and other times as a ghost that haunts the edifice, she chooses a different register to get us acquainted with the loneliness and melancholy of ruination. If genius loci, the “spirit of the place” had a face, that would certainly have the expression of Larisa Korivo, a frequent collaborator of one of the most idiosyncratic directors in world cinema; in his interpretation of the phenomenon of kenopsia (the eerie atmosphere of a place that's usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet), Coté explores the dynamics of the so-called liminal spaces and opens up a field for the projection of our innermost desires. A film with a wide-open form inviting us to the sealed rooms of the soul, so that we can finally encounter what insists on keeping us confined.