One day, Julie heard voices threatening her. Doctors gave her electric shocks, marabouts tried to exorcise her, she swallowed a lot of medicines, drank a lot of potions, spent days in the hospital, and long hours locked up at home trying to forget the past and imagine the future. Administratively speaking, she is since her first hospitalization an 80% “disabled” person. In my eyes, she is a precious friend, a sensitive soul, a resister who decided that she would not make “a career of victim”. For five years, I have been filming her. Together, we dive into her past and discover the story of a heroine.
Selected at the Rencontres Images Mentales de Bruxelles (2023), the Sheffield Doc Fest (2022), and the Écrans Documentaires d’Arcueil (2021).
At the end of the 1990s, Mia Ma watched Jean-Pierre Thorn’s film Faire kiffer les anges on her television set, driven by her love of hip-hop dance. She discovered with enthusiasm a kind of documentary she had never seen before, which transforms intimacy into politics, and reality into cinema. It is only ten years later, after having served chicken at KFC, worn hostess and mascot costumes, obtained a master’s degree in Philosophy, written for magazines, filmed and edited X-rated videos, reports, institutional films and DIY tutorials, that she decides to learn filmmaking at the Ateliers Varan, convinced that documentary cinema is a privileged way to question the world we live in.
CINÉMA DU PARC