Still: looking she said I forget - Naomi Pacifique

Amsterdam-based Swiss/Dutch filmmaker Naomi Pacifique returns to Locarno with her new short film looking she said i forget*, in which she once more explores the complexities of non-monogamous relationships. 

In the film, French-speaking Lou has just moved to Amsterdam. As she awaits the arrival of her partner Joel, who is spending time with an intimate friend, she determines to become more acquainted with her new city.

As in her 2021 film after a room, intimacy is at the core of Pacifique’s film, as is melancholy and a sense of displacement, whether geographical or emotional. Much of this derives from an internal pain born out of childhood trauma, the director confides.

“That was a starting point of both this film and after a room. I think I definitely work from a place of deep pain. I feel like there's always pain to tap into and to explore in the self,” she says. “And through intimacy, it can be explored…I know that in my personal life I've had this kind of dichotomy between the side of me that doesn't want to exist, that just wants to be under a blanket, and then the side of me that really wants to exist, that puts myself in my own films and that makes a film in the first place.”

Non-monogamous relationships may offer myriad opportunities for love, pleasure and new experiences, but one is prone to increasing levels of vulnerability, Pacifique observes. “By opening myself to potential love or connection, I also open myself up to everyone new that I take in. I take in their pain also.”

Not that this is a negative. In the film, Pacifique herself appears on screen to advise Lou on the pleasures of both seeing and being seen. “You are seeing each other's pain also,” the director tells SEE NL. “This is an important part of love…I'm biased to non-monogamy. I really like open love, but I think that in an open love, those things come to the surface much more.”

“I think that a lot of love has to do with being seen. The people that I've felt the most love towards, or recognized love most from in my life, have been people that I have seen very clearly and who I felt seen by. If someone tells me something that's very authentic to me, I feel this really big surge of being seen and of love from them,” she adds.

Pacifique may have come late to film (she is also a musician and writer), but she has a very cinematic eye and a tendency towards motif that provides tonal unity across her works. Lou’s synesthetic response to the colour blue derives from “not being the centre of the world anymore” once she decides to go down the path of polyamory. The walls of her apartment are blue, as is the lamp and bulb that Lou must fix. 

Likewise, the male latrine outside of her apartment prompts Lou to speak of her jealousy over guys’ ability to pee standing up. When she later picks up Dutch Yannick and bathes with him, she giggles as he himself proceeds to pee in the shower.

The film is personal and intimate but intentionally devoid of one core ingredient. “I really wanted to make a film about open relationships that didn't have sex in it,” Pacifique underlines. “I feel so much that on screen our associations with open relationships are to do with sex, but actually there's so much more to it. There's more about how we treat each other and see each other on the daily lives. So that's why I avoided any sex scenes.”

Pacifique tells of her satisfaction with the Netherlands Film Fund and its support, and how she receives regular creative guidance from within Fund walls. “It's the same consultants, so they can really follow my trajectory and I'm building a relationship with them, and it means the better their feedback, the more we can speak to each other. The Dutch Film Fund really influenced this short film.”

Locarno 2024 will screen another short film by Pacifique; you look beautiful from here, which was prepped, written and shot over 5 days under the tutelage of Alice Diop during the 2024 Locarno Spring Academy. In the film, two young women meet, reflect and bond over tactile sculptures (as well as a set of Tarot cards) within a Swiss hotel.

“There are some experiences that are so beautiful,” says the director of working with Diop, as well as with other arthouse luminaries in the past, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Teddy Williams. “I learned so much about filmmaking through them. And I was really so happy to be able to participate at the Spring Academy. It gave me a lot of confidence in what I can achieve in just five days.”

looking she said I forget is produced by Idle Eye (NL) and co-produced by Golden Egg Productions (Switzerland).

Find out more about Locarno Film Festival here. 

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund