When the Girls Were Flirting with the Gods

An unusual portrait of young artist Florence Reymond, who bases her paintings on the ambivalent world of childhood, a combination of innocence and cruel indifference in which she makes references to art history. As the artist herself explains in this partly staged documentary that takes a great deal of poetic license, her work looks at how our selective collective memory allows us to forget large sections of our childhood. Painting is a way for Reymond to conjure up the "shadow of our memory." On the canvas, all the ghosts that haunt us appear. Director Damien Faure has not made a standard portrait of Reymond, but instead one that summons up the paintings through another medium - cinema - and does justice to the primal scenes depicted in these works. On canvas, Reymond captures the field of tension between barbarism and the acquirement of good behavior with an image of a cute little girl with a gun. The film interweaves a fairytale about a little princess and prince who are fleeing from war: a wizard wants to destroy the world and reorganize it according to his own vision. In this way, the paintings and the film shift between angels and demons, and poetry and barbarism. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)