Alexe Poukine’s daring new documentary film shatters conventional wisdom about rape

Alexe Poukine’s new documentary tackles with a daring and illuminating directing bias the question of rape and the “grey areas” that very often accompany this “large-scale societal phenomenon”. The film, in theaters on March 9, 2022, stages the testimony of Ada, a victim, in an original and offbeat way.

At the origin of the film, a meeting of Ada with the director Alexe Poukine in 2013, at the end of the screening of her first feature film, Sleep, sleep in the stones. Ada tells him what happened to him nine years earlier.

When she was 18, Ada decided to move to Lille with her best friend, Mathilde. The two young girls dream of the high life, far from their parents. Ada meets Hugo, with whom she experiences her first love. Mathilde also met a boy, named Julien. But Hugo leaves Ada, and Mathilde’s boyfriend confesses to him that he is in love with his roommate.

Matilda leaves. Ada agrees to spend an evening with Julien to remove the ambiguities, dissipate the “unease” she feels in his presence. But the reverse is happening. Ada, a virgin, undergoes a non-consensual sexual relationship, then a second, and yet a third, in the same week. The young woman goes to the three meetings with Julien of her own free will. It will take her time to put a word on what she suffered and experienced as a shame: a rape.

The film addresses with sensitivity all the questions that arise about rape: the facts, the shame, the guilt, the damage it causes. The words are sometimes raw, sometimes suspended, so difficult is it to talk about this trauma. “I was nobody anymore”says Ada in the voice of an actress.

“You could say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but there are experiences that basically unlearn you. You unlearn connection, you unlearn desire, you unlearn trust. Is that interesting? No, it’s not at all”

“We are used to describing the rapist as a monster, such a big monster that cannot be compared to anyone real, which is to say that he does not exist”, says one of the protagonists. However, and the film reminds us, a third of rapes take place within couples, and in the majority of cases, the victim knows her rapist.

To stage Ada’s story, the director decided to have others say the words written by Ada to tell her story. “I met several perpetrators of rape for the film, sometimes lovely people, who could be my best friends! After a while, I understood that the subject of the film was empathy, that it was the question: how can you identify with someone who has been through this? So I asked Ada to write this text, I divided it into several parts, and I looked for people who could interpret it and comment on it”, explains the director.

Actresses, but also psychologists, lawyers, prostitutes, or even her close friends, women and men, of all ages, seize Ada’s words by putting a little of what they are. Then they comment, express what they feel and understand (or not) about this story. Then Ada’s text takes them little by little towards their own experiences, their own experiences, buried pain and shame, whether they are women or men, aggressors or attacked.

This skilful device puts an experience into an abyss and makes it possible to question everyone (the protagonists of the film as well as the spectators) about their own relationship to sexuality, to consent, to the notion of rape, and to deconstruct “the fantasized image”.

The idea of ​​embodying Ada’s story in the voices of this choir is also a way for the director to show that rape is not only an individual drama, but also a “large-scale societal phenomenon”. Embodied by a diversity of faces – women, men, old, young, white, black, aggressors, attacked – this story allows, by blurring the tracks, to put in place very powerful identification mechanisms, while questioning the spectator on the clichés, on the representations.

The interviews follow one another in static shots, almost without any transition, and are most often carried out in a familiar setting, in the places where the speakers live, bathed in soft light. An enveloping atmosphere which contrasts with the violence of the subject, and which accompanies the spectator in the apprehension of a complicated subject. Both in substance and in form, Without knocking is a strong and enlightening film which, beyond the question of rape, questions sexuality, desire, the ability of each person to express their own desire and to hear that of the other.

Gender: documentary
Director: Alexe Poukine
Duration : 1h25
Country : France
Exit : March 9, 2022
Distributer : The Twenty-Fifth Hour
Summary: Ada is nineteen years old. She agrees to go to dinner with a boy she knows. Everything is going very quickly, she does not defend herself. His body is bruised, his mind diffracted. Ada’s story blends with those of others, all different and yet similar. The same dirty story, insane and banal, seen from different angles.