The Space
Eléonor Gilbert
2014 - 14 min - HD - Couleur - France

"The boys won’t let us play football at school." Paper and pencil to hand, a young girl details how the games are shared out in her schoolyard. She constantly reconfigures her sketch, demarcating the different zones of exclusion, big squares, small circles, sports enclaves to be circumvented: all of them are limits that the boys repeatedly overstep. On a daily basis, the problem is increasingly widespread as a dynamic working between genders, with the schoolyard its microcosm. A territorial war? More like an occupation, and one that seems to bother hardly anyone except the young girl bearing witness and who loves football.
Soon, we notice that the girls are not only assigned to the smallest areas of the schoolyard, but also required to remain invisible. The sequence shot of the first part cedes to the editing, once it is clear that all possible solutions have, worryingly, been exhausted and the drawing is saturated.
The cut to black mid-film functions as a breathing space. The impulse to continue comes first from behind the camera – "And you, do you really want to play football?" Yet, even when the filmmaker asks questions out-of-frame, she never poses as a guide or counsellor. Doubtless, the answer can only come from inside the field, and will perhaps require several successive labyrinths. (Charlotte Garson)