At the San Sebastián International Film Festival, I met filmmaker Marlène Emilie Lyngstad at the Hotel María Cristina to discuss « Cute », her debut feature. Exploring transgressive desires and a relationship that resists straightforward moral categorisation, the film deliberately places the viewer in an uncomfortable position : it asks audiences neither to endorse its characters’ behaviour nor to condemn them outright, but to take the time to examine what lies behind their impulses, their loneliness and their need to be loved.

Tristan Baille : In « Body of Glass », artistic creation is at times connected with violence, destruction and human contradictions. Was this something that was already on your mind when you were writing the film ?

Naemi Ada : Yes, I thought about it a lot while writing, about the way art can sometimes emerge from violence, destruction or contradiction. We are human beings, and we are made up of very different things, sometimes even opposing things. Nothing is completely pure or perfectly coherent. There can be something strange in the way we live, communicate and behave towards one another, and art is also part of that complexity. For me, making a film is perhaps a way of entering into those contradictions rather than trying to resolve them.