Anleitung ein anderer zu werden

Becoming someone else... Shedding one identity in order to invent another... Tearing off the skin called origins and putting on another one called future, scraping the hated precariat DNA out of the old body and then Adonis-ising the new body into the wet dream of the intellectual bourgeoisie... What does that mean?

Édouard, whose real name is Eddy, doesn't want to be poor and hungry and go without new clothes, and he doesn't want to spend his whole life running between his house, school and factory in a forgotten 5 km² corner of the French countryside, and he doesn't want to have to hide his desire for other men his whole life. Édouard wants... basically anything other than to be someone else. He wants to belong. But he is stuck. He is stuck in the fate of a class, a milieu, a status. He is stuck in the necessity of changing himself in order to escape his origins. His origins, which are his family, his working-class family, his father. But not becoming his father, becoming the opposite of his father, leaving him behind completely, cutting him off from the family tree of a fateful biography as much as possible – that is not possible. Even in the gaping distance between his proletarian homeland and his bourgeois exile, his father is looming. A negative omnipresence that, like one's own shadow, can never really be escaped and perhaps is not really intended to be escaped. For is there not also longing and tenderness?

In a poetic, fragmentary adaptation of French shooting star Édouard Louis' novel Change: A Method, emerging director Chiara Liotine explores the relationship between a father and son, peeling away layer after layer of memories to reveal a complex relationship.