Light up the Void  

From September 15 to 21, 2025, La Cinémathèque française devoted a full retrospective to filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović, one of contemporary cinema’s most elusive and singular voices. Over the course of a week, audiences were invited to revisit nearly three decades of a body of work as sparse as it is haunting.

The program traced a clear artistic trajectory. It began with La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, a disturbing early short exploring fractured childhood, and moved through her breakthrough feature Innocence, set in a secluded boarding school where ritual and mystery replace explanation. From the outset, Hadžihalilović established her signature grammar: minimal dialogue, meticulous framing, and an atmosphere thick with suggestion.

With Évolution, she ventured further into the uncanny, crafting an aquatic fable of mothers and sons that feels both biological and mythic. Later, Earwig confirmed her fascination with confinement, ambiguous authority figures, and bodies in flux. The inclusion of shorts such as De natura and Nectar underscored the remarkable coherence of her vision—an oeuvre sculpted through silence and sensory precision.

The retrospective culminated with La Tour de glace, her most recent feature, loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen. In it, a young orphan becomes enthralled by an enigmatic actress, extending the filmmaker’s recurring themes of fascination, control, and metamorphosis within an icy, crystalline visual world.

Beyond the screenings, a public masterclass offered insight into her creative process. Hadžihalilović spoke of constructing films through texture and rhythm rather than exposition—of preserving mystery rather than resolving it. “To show without explaining” could well summarize her approach.

This retrospective ultimately reaffirmed her place apart from trends and industry currents. In Hadžihalilović’s cinema, childhood is never innocent, the fantastic emerges organically from the everyday, and meaning lingers in the shadows long after the lights come up.