Character

For almost two years, the filmmaker Paul Heintz went in search of Winston Smith, in an investigation that was part of a multimedia project. When he publishes a classified advert in the English daily newspaper The Sun to find namesakes of the hero of the novel 1984, he causes a collision between fiction and reality. Somewhere between deconstruction and reinterpretation, the director sets off to meet people, in a dystopian casting exercise set amidst dehumanised urban landscapes. The texture of the archival image transports us into the spirit of this cult book published in 1949, while the different film-portraits that appear reveal, above all, the social dimension of the filmic process. Under its author’s worried gaze, the dystopia imagined by George Orwell ultimately merges with the social and political conflicts of the 21st century. While the daily life of these illustrious strangers becomes dystopian, absorbed by our imagination, their final encounter cleverly challenges everyone’s role in an individualistic society turned upside down by the pandemic.

Javier Martín