R
E T
I N A S
1H40 | 2026 | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE
FILM IN PRODUCTION
FICTION ROMANCE FANTASY
BY YANNIK RUAULT
Lillian's life is turned upside down by her meeting with Clay, her double.
In our society governed by fear, a fear inside us, each one of us is victim, guilty, and innocent. In this society which no longer believes in the Great Story, nor even in progress, how can we find a future? Which deep truth gives meaning to our lives? Do we have to turn back on ourselves hoping for an interior revelation, at the risk of looking at ourselves endlessly? Of losing ourselves in a narcissism isolating us off from others? Or do we have to confront the Other, the others, to fight our inner ghosts, forces bigger than us, at the risk of losing the battle and never finding our deep truth?
RETINAS is an intimate movie, a portrait of our society in which narcissism grows considerably, leading to an extreme reduction of ideological issues. As the Narcissus cannot understand the Other, his symptom is a fertile field for flourishing two ideologies. A liberal materialism with the anomie of the self - everyone living false truths privatised. A regressive nationalism with the obsession of the self-preference – everyone being Nation inside himself.
We “Unfreedmen” know this overarching self so poorly. Cinema reveals its secret depths and its monsters because cinema offers enlarged experiences. We view as if we were monsters. RETINAS animates these monsters of the existence: the most real, our organs; the most abstract, our ghosts; the most absolute, our loves.
The retina is the inner layer of the eye that receives light and transmits it to the optic nerve. It makes sense to consider a retina as a miniature double of a cinema screen, a surface receiving light and transmitting it to our spirit.