Fantasy

We often get to know characters by viewing them from the outside. But in Isabel Pagliai’s feature-length debut, we meet the protagonist through her interior life: her deepest fantasies, her conversations with herself, and her diary entries.

On the surface, we don’t learn much about Louise. She lies in her bed, takes the occasional bath, listens frantically to music, and writes in her notebooks. She seems stuck, haunted by something in her past. Louise speaks to no one except her cat. We only learn her name when a young man finds her notebook on a train. They then meet in a forest—a shared dream world, or perhaps a figment of the imagination.

Fantasy is an unconventional documentary that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction. When they met by chance, Louise told Pagliai she wanted to make a film. The result doesn’t so much document her life as stage it, and thereby transforms it.