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This year’s winner enjoys Diop’s compelling lockdown film for Miu Miu, filmed entirely from her 24th-floor Paris apartment
• Read the rest of this year’s shortlisted entries in the Observer/Anthony Burgess prize
It can be said that lockdown has not been kind to fashion: last October the UK press reported that the country was facing a leisurewear shortage. When the French-Senegalese director and actor Mati Diop was approached early last year by the fashion house Miu Miu to make a short film for its Women’s Tales series, it posed a challenge. The brief for the series (which has run since 2011 and featured film-makers including Zoe Cassavettes, Chloë Sevigny and Lynne Ramsay) is straightforward enough: the film-makers must be women and can film whatever they choose, providing the film features Miu Miu clothing. The situation becomes more complicated during a pandemic: how exactly do you make a film – and one with fashion as a focus – amid the isolation, confinement and leisurewear of lockdown?
In Diop’s 20-minute film In My Room, we are entirely confined to her small studio on the 24th floor of a tower block in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. The action, such as it is, takes place at the windows: Diop focuses her camera on her neighbours’ apartments and the sprawl of surrounding neighbourhoods. While the weather provides some drama (it rains, it shines, it thunders, the fog rolls in), we mostly see nothing much. It is compelling nonetheless, as Diop’s long-focus lens lingers intimately on a woman fussing over her curtains, or a man looking anxiously from cookbook to microwave. In one gloomy window, two silhouetted figures suddenly embrace and kiss passionately; in another, a man leans forward heavily and drags on a cigarette in the dark. Continue reading...