Jessie Zinn
United States, South Africa | 2021 | 10 min
World premiere
Language : English
Subtitle : French
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the volunteers at a telephone helpline gather stories of abortion. A remarkable account, in which intimate speech spreads to the sound of the waves of a calm sea, flowing into a poetic film dedicated “to the women who find the courage to talk and to the women who listen to them.”
In the San Francisco Bay Area, volunteers at a telephone helpline gather traumatic abortion-related experiences. In the middle of the night, lockdown measures push the volunteers to work from home. Wavelengths paints a picture of the power of speech to heal emotions that are hard to express, and even more so in the confusion of the period of isolation. With a rare sensitivity, Jessie Zinn rebuilds a confidential space for speech, thanks to precise framing, her sense of observation, and a remarkable work on the sound which produces a powerful immersive effect, always at the service of empowered voices. The images show us the difficult path of these words of distress through a nocturnal, foggy landscape, a phantasmagorical universe in perpetual movement towards intimacy. Dedicated “to the women who find the courage to talk and those who listen to them”, Wavelengths gives us a glimpse of attentiveness, and humbly, of the emotions and feelings brought on by an abortion.
Javier Martín
