Picture of the movie Share © Sabrina Lanthos
Share, psychological harassment in the digital age
Lauded by critics at the Sundance Film Festival, Share is the first feature film of American director Pippa Bianco, in which she deals with themes of voyeurism, shame and isolation in the age of social media networks. Presented in Special Screenings, the film is in competition for the Caméra d’or.
In 2015, Pippa Bianco won the Cinéfondation First Prize with Share, an 11-minute short film with hardly any dialogue. The storyline follows a high school girl who is assailed by messages and the film explores the psychological consequences of rape.
From this central concept emerged the director's first feature film, with an eponymous title, in which she continues to explore memory, privacy, isolation and incertitude through 16-year old Mandy, whose life is overturned when she discovers a disturbing video of an evening that she does not remember. Confronted with the ghostly absence of memory around an event that haunts her, Mandy tries to revive her memory and look for the truth while the consequences of that evening are playing havoc with her life.
The term “Share” refers both to possession and disclosure of information, and I wanted to address the question of the rights we think we have over other people’s experiences.
Using her experience as a point of departure, Pippa Bianco interviewed numerous victims and experts, and the director emphasizes the way those testimonies helped to "create an emotional experience and to reflect on the difficulties that Mandy goes through when she experiences huge turmoil".
To take into account the dark reality of Mandy's ambivalent emotions, the director also brought in the electronic artist Shlohmo, whose "compositions take us to the darkest feelings". In this era of new technologies and social media, at the heart of our society, Share is an invitation to reflect on the ravages that they can cause.
