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Clean With Me (After Dark)

Gabrielle Stemmer // France // 2019 // 21:23 min

Documentary

Synopsis:
On YouTube, one can find hundreds of videos in which women clean and tidy their homes. What initially appears amusing and satirical, gradually reveals itself to be a deep hole of loneliness, compensation and the attempt to create stability, at least on film, for one's self and other like minds.

Three Questions for the Director

1. Short Film has a unique way of telling stories and exploring themes. What is it that fascinates you about the short format?

Gabrielle Stemmer: I would say speed. You have to get right to the point, know what you want to say and where you want to take the viewer, and implement it with precision and accuracy. This is what I wanted to put in place in my film, and I like the fact that after the 21 minutes have passed, the viewer wakes up and is like "wow, what a trip did I just take?"

2. The program your film is selected for is called “Reality Bites": What connection do you see between your film and that title?

Gabrielle Stemmer: I like it. I think it refers to both the sharpness or of acerbic side of the film, and its aesthetics of the mosaic. I like this concept of pieces, of fragments, which joins my practice, which consists in taking bits of the internet here and there, fragments of a disseminated reality on line, and making them dialogue. And I like the idea that my film, put end to end with the other films in the selection, in turn forms the reconstructed mirror of our society.

3. What film has inspried you most to make films yourself and what part of it do you see in your own work?

Gabrielle Stemmer: Rather, I realized that we don't necessarily make films that look like the ones we love! It is the great American classics that made me want to make cinema, pure fiction films. Or poetic, mysterious films, like those of Kieslowski. Quite far from what I've done so far! But for Clean With Me (After Dark), it's definitely the work of Kevin B. Lee, and especially Transformers : The Premake, that inspired me and gave me the manual I was looking for to deal with my subject. And apart from that, above the film floats the ghost of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman.