"Clare Weiskopf and Nicolás Van Hemelryck brilliantly crafted a cinematic experience in which the rhythm of the edits is unpredictable and rich. The premise of the film - displacing the protagonists personal experience with a third person testimony about a fictional surrogate - allows for documentary to slip into fiction, and for first person singular experience to open to that of the first person plural. As we sit down, we look into the eyes of a group of young girls who speak about Alis. Is she real? Is she not? We hear her experiences - her upbringing, her struggles, how she feels, what she believes, and through the plural, diverse and inconsistent image of her, we too imagine and construct the portrait of her witnesses. As the narrative interweaves between the various versions of Alis' portrait, a new polyphonous whole - their own shared experience - emerges. The trust the girls put in their interviewers is palpable. Eyes look back at us as the young women give themselves to the camera, without filter. Leaning into the power, nuance and subtlety of imagination, we read into the heart and pain of these remarkable young people, and feel the fluidity and complexity of their identities. Their world - an isolated and fenced shelter for young girls, where the interviews take place - may feel like a prison, but it is here that their imagination is allowed to run free, and with the imagination's aid, for their lives to begin to heal."
