Baudelaire distributed Sony handicams to five of the students, some fully blind and some severely visually impaired. (The footage was assembled with editor Claire Atherton, a longtime collaborator of Chantal Akerman.) In an early scene, Kadiatou, a philosophically inclined girl, shows a classmate how to use the camera; we see through the lens as the girls\u2019 hands feel their way around the lens cap. A beautiful film, Kadiatou opines, \u201chas to be properly shot and all that\u201d, but also \u201cappearing natural, and filming according to our intuition. I think intuition is more beautiful than something that\u2019s scripted or staged or precise.\u201d It will be beautiful because it came from them.<\/p>\n
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A scene from \u00c9ric Baudelaire’s For the Moon (Car la lune, 2026) Courtesy New York Film Festival<\/p>\n
At first, the film\u2019s subject-cinematographers are \u201ca bit self-conscious\u201d, as M\u00e8\u00ef says, setting up her camera facing her. The compositions are awkward, and the girls don\u2019t always know how close or far away from an object to hold the camera; at times the picture is entirely abstract, creating a flicker film-like effect. The odd framings, blown-out backgrounds and lens flares frequently recall the ragged, conditional quality of the cheap, precious digital images that the low-budget Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has produced since he began to have vision problems.<\/p>\n
There is an excitement and intimacy to the way Baudelaire\u2019s subjects tell the camera their stories. Their faces on the edge of the frame, or cut off above or below the nose, or at an off-kilter angle, they hush their voices and tell the stories of their blindness. Iris, who lost her right eye at age 9 and knows that the loss of her left is imminent, addresses tapes to \u201c\u00c9ric\u201d and films the videos she has saved on her phone, such as one of her favourite carnival ride. When she filmed the video, she could see better than she can now, but she can still remember what the ride looks like. You think of her world freezing in place. Her favourite ride is really a ride for little kids, she says, but it\u2019s the only one that\u2019s safe for her to go on\u2014after her remaining eye is removed, she will be able to go on them all, she says with anticipation; but on the other hand, she will never see the fireworks at Disneyland.<\/p>\n
Iris is also a musician\u2014she makes autotuned raps about bad relationships and summer vacations\u2014as are many of the other girls. Jade plays her original compositions, and Crystal can play Beethoven, Brassens, and blind French pop star Gilbert Montagn\u00e9 from memory. When M\u00e8\u00ef films her performing, Crystal messes up her first song, curses at herself, then practically shivers with pleasure as she demands M\u00e8\u00ef delete the video; she is visibly excited at the merging of her private and public selves, at the sounds she makes and the image she projects.<\/p>\n
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A scene from \u00c9ric Baudelaire’s For the Moon (Car la lune, 2026) Courtesy New York Film Festival<\/p>\n
Their creativity is heartfelt and expressive, and makes for extraordinarily touching cinema, as any diaristic project drawing forth the private dreams of teenage girls is likely to be. But For the Moon is also casually radical in the way it reorients point-of-view. By giving his subjects cameras, Baudelaire invites us to see the world through their eyes; this principle, usually an axiom, is here a paradox.<\/p>\n
After Iris\u2019s second enucleation, she records a few voice memos, which Baudelaire and Atherton play against all-black backgrounds, before she starts filming again. Her first video post-surgery begins in total darkness, before she commands Alexa to open the shutters. Daylight floods in, the world comes into focus; our entry into the scene is cued to the sound of her voice, attuning us to the images captured by her camera, the familiar objects in a teenager\u2019s room, the confused clutter of girlish and adolescent objects. So far, so straightforward, until Iris points the camera out her bedroom window\u2014taking in the landscape, you might say\u2014and then matter-of-factly reminds us that she cannot see anything anymore, that this perspective, offered up to us as an extension of her subjectivity, is something far more ambiguous. Faith being \u201cthe evidence of things not seen\u201d takes on an entirely new meaning.<\/p>\n