Intimacy Without Consequence

Visiting Vilnius SFF 2026

Away from Vilnius Short Film Festival’s central theatrical screenings, Meduza Gallery hosted an exhibition of Susanna Wallin’s films—meditative loops on Floridian encounters at different scales. Soon after me, and by chance, Wallin herself entered the otherwise empty space and sat down to watch the projections, snacking on something. I let myself sink into it all, willingly sedated. I had come here to step away from the festival for a moment, looking for an essay subject.

The central screenings had begun to blur into one another—faces, voices, and disclosures in quick succession soon saturated me. Simultaneously, the exigent pace of fresh romance demanded a similar velocity; that of knowing and being known without delay. The familiar urgency to offer or be offered something, before it could be withheld. I rarely resist this, and reach shamelessly for the mechanisms of oversharing and so-called “TMI” to speed up the bonding process with someone I’ve just met, securing closeness before its time. But in this instance, one confession followed the next, and things were left feeling oddly untouched. One short film after another passed through me, and nothing stayed. And it was only there, sitting in front of a mosaic of dead leaves drifting off on slow water, that I began to taste the staleness of a pattern in which you arrive already knowing me, and I you.

If only we could peel back our skin at the wrist, peer inside ourselves and retrieve evidence of our rot, X-ray scans of what we’ve known to be there all along, bones and teeth glowing against warm, cloudy density. The ability to pitch yourself on a first date, or to sell your unique perspective compressed into a short film standing in for a business card. Aestheticised and compressed personal experience as the source material you promise to dilute future offerings from. Extreme vulnerability disguised as exposure gets to the core, accelerates the intimate through shock and disruption and, ultimately, grants you the coveted resource of attention.

The line between giving and performing, between being seen and being claimed, between personal and private, has dissolved. Nothing is too unkempt or too unprocessed to spill. Because exposure alone carries the weight, the rawer the form, and the sooner its supply, the better. We are our own publicists, making the call to jump the gun. This is unquestionably, invariably me: take me or leave me.

Meanwhile, the image that no longer opens onto the world, but closes back into the self, evaporates before it reaches my spectating eyes. Pre-emptive vulnerability removes discovery, the lover’s inquisitive eye lingers long enough to turn clinical, and curiosity morphs into invasion. There’s no disbelief to suspend; nothing is being asked of me. Do I even need to be here? It is not discernment taking me out of the gallery, the theatre, the date. It’s boredom. My recently gained inability to resist the lull of something that won’t immediately open.

In turn, our impatience shapes the strategies of anyone, or anything, that wants to meet us. I watch curated short film programmes and feel like a speed-dater, meant to take my pick at the end. I feel handled, but even my resistance is compliant. The increasing prevalence of the personal narrative in film attests both to its posturing and harmlessness. Above all, the stance it takes regarding not just the validity, but the importance, of each person’s story, is highly productive. Each a closed circuit of experience, authenticated simply by the fact of having been lived, promises a virtually limitless source of work. Against the historical backdrop of suppression and caricature, we are, of course, eager to reclaim agency and speak for ourselves. But although “write what you know” once carried undeniable ethical force in a world of unequal access to speech, it has also morphed into “stay in your lane,” no longer opening space but partitioning it. What began as redistribution becomes a multiplication of enclosures for one. Each story’s merit is secured by how indisputably its own it is, how singular. What circulates is comparison, if at all, but no contact. “It’s mine to tell” was once the weapon of the silenced; now it’s a shield for the masses.

The familiar quest for a repossession of the body here arrives plastered onto the repossession of the story. To reveal one is to take control over the other. María Cristina Pérez González’s Once In A Body says “this is what I’m made of,” namely, guts and skin and organs, but also their extremity, distortion, and visceral excess. The exposure of flesh stands in for confession, both leading the direct path to reveal what is inside. The animated film’s textures are thick, almost edible, paired with the wet and granular sound of one’s own mouth.

In Mireia Vilapuig’s Skin Despair, the adoption of the POV format—not just because it is told from the teenage protagonist’s perspective but because she literally holds the camera that documents the world around her as much as her own, mutating body—creates the illusion of authenticity through apparent access and agency, in turn disarming critique. We don’t approach or encounter her; we are her, the low resolution of her camera further closing the distance between her and us, reaching for the unfiltered and unmediated.

The recurrent need to narrativise one’s experience of girlhood, itself so confusing, mythologised, violent, and radically isolating, is a pressure point that, repeatedly, meets systems that format speech itself. Both the film’s form and its recognition to me hint at a very specific intention: that of confirming the suspected universality of an experience. Taking a singular, microscopic human life to arrive at a faithful representation of the cosmos. Though said intention inevitably carries within itself enough self-awareness to know the impossibility of the task, it nevertheless stays with me that, with few things as reductive as labelling something a universal experience, we run the risk of being left with narrowed options to represent what has already gathered consensus.

On the other end of the spectrum, Their Eyes by Nicolas Gourault is built around seemingly untouched testimonies, a variety of voices regrouped to expand the scope. This collectivity offers a certain protection in its own right and adds weight to the legitimacy required to enter certain circuits of conversation. An almost journalistic approach that feels like it resists exploitation, aggrandisation, or self-spectacle. But, of course, testimony is never raw. It is chaperoned, extracted, selected, stripped, edited, sequenced, contextualised, and digested by someone before it reaches us. The gaze isn’t eliminated; it’s obscured. Meanwhile, critique is equally disarmed, because the personal, lived experience of each (notably, remote) worker remains at the core.

Picture by Nilay Conraud

Festival and film funding infrastructure increasingly favour a coherent “authorial voice” and legible personal stakes under the pretense that this results in cinema with impact. The problem is not reaching for a personal lens, it’s that the personal stops being dialectical, even in collective, testimonial forms. Everything is a self-portrait (even when it pretends not to be), and nothing exceeds or can exceed the immediacy of the self. It’s the closest thing on hand. Grief arrives attached to categories I know how to read and respond to, and the strange comfort that this predictability comes with keeps me severed from it. What is yours is valid, undeniable, visible, and more importantly it will never be mine. I will empathise, but not at the expense of my cherished, unique, and nontransferable self.

Moreover, taboo sells. And while all becomes slowly designed for us to take turns talking, the circle keeps widening. Cinema’s ability to reveal the world is inverted: like a self-consuming black hole it all bends back toward interiority, ever deeper, mining the viscera for the next uncomfortable secret. The gesture of confession starts to resemble something older, something ritualistic. An echo of guilt to trade for purification. Exposure grants redemption. Visibility stands in for honesty and having something we are willing to confess is alchemised into social currency. After all, if our grief is to be contained by language, let us shape it so that it might be witnessed in alignment with our self-image. To different degrees of abstraction, art and film forms make this possible. But shouldn’t we want to exceed this purpose?

It’s easier to talk about oneself than to consider the whole we belong to. It is safer for me to write a personal essay of my personal experience of a film or a festival than to critique a piece someone put their whole guts into. Even if I were to diagnose, to stand for or against, it would only serve the purpose of revealing the narrow outline of my own limits and biases.

Recently, during a school screening I was facilitating at a cinema I found myself in for the first time, I left the room while the film played and accepted a coffee from the projectionist. The whole hour and a half stretched and swelled with our conversation. By the end, I knew her life trajectory, everything she studied and the source of her traumas, how she felt about anthropology, the names of her exes and how they overlapped, what she did last weekend and what she would do the following one, what her thoughts were on communitarianism, first films, and the ethics of owning one’s story. I told her about this essay. She gave me pointers. We had just met, and I hadn’t asked for this information nor had I in any way refused it.

Letting the space between us close didn’t feel strategic, let alone appropriate. Under the bright combination of morning sun and neon ceiling lights, the grime of it was familiar but out of place. You don’t tell me what to do with the things you give me, so I stuff my pockets. The humiliating need to be known doesn’t know how to wait. So it spills. You tell me a story and I cut across it to say: “Yes, I see myself in it.” I pick up on how trained my body feels for this, how wired my social cues are. The way I lean forward, not just ready but expecting nothing short of the self to be laid bare. I’ve grown so used to intimacy at every corner that what I notice most is its interruption. It’s become intolerable not to know what is in front of me. Intolerable to sit in silence. Intolerable to be denied access.

If life flows one way or another, the real issue is the channels through which it moves. An overproduction and overformatting through narrow, pre-established routes cheapens the transformative power of storytelling. The constant circulation of personal narratives rendered legible, stripping them of the political potential that challenging a status quo contains.

Picture by Nilay Conraud

I’m on a plane back to Paris from Vilnius. When it momentarily drops in the middle of turbulence, a hand reaches for mine without permission or introduction. I smile at the nameless woman next to me and stroke her knuckles, feel the rugged textures of her various rings until the aircraft steadies, and she withdraws, her hand catching briefly against my grip. The sudden and obscene proximity of briefly belonging to each other is over again. I never thought the plane might actually crash and kill us, but she did, and this spared the gesture from the mimicry of connection for connection’s sake.

All of this is also not just about how trauma is displayed, but about how its circulation reshapes desire itself. Constantly exposed or offered to others, you disintegrate before you’ve reached me. Resist the echo of the walls our stories bounce off, or risk flattening them into something swiftly tradeable. Everything that once burned bright and consumed us is now dimmed, trauma tastes bland, and we start to reach for aggrandising spectacle to convey its gravity. As if our real lives ought to adhere to narrative arcs that center the protagonist and their hurdles, thereby asserting our individuality. And I just might start pretending to be scared of flying to hold strangers’ hands.

“Oversharing” is not just safety; it’s also hunger for recognition, survival instinct, and relief. It can be relational, mutual, and spontaneous, as much as what follows can be void. What happened to owing each other presence, care, and community beyond the initial sparks of attraction? Is it enough to feel briefly, albeit intensely, implicated in someone’s life, until the lights of the theatre come back on? Is it enough to feel enlightened, even challenged, by a film if the experience merely ends up adding to my cultural capital?

Do you want me in control, or do you want to feel like I’m not? How much of my vulnerability will it take for you to feel safe? The highest form of control becomes the performance of its lack, and what is painted as surrender is, in fact, total authorship. Shaky images, raw voices, unfiltered confessions: every tremor is calibrated to its audience. The more I seem to give, the less you can take. I’m no longer even sure who is sitting across from whom. I sense a possibility of closeness and feel pre-emptively dizzy. Under the weight of all those who came before us, I confess and empty my pockets, but this is an already beaten path. I forget we are the heirs of the risks taken, not the comforts gained, from revelation. I must give you all the variables. Instead, I subtract from my experience what I don’t bother to understand. Multiply the result by your language so that I might appeal.

The world fades into a constellation of tightly sealed interiors. Asserting a temporary independence from the structures that led to them, these increasingly personal and intimate narratives perform vulnerability, when there is, in fact, a lot of safety in affirming one’s individuality as if one is an island for others to discover. This, in a way, eschews consequence by abstaining from any promise of durable, transformative responsibility to others and the risks this implies. Safely inside this closed circuit, where all we do is confirm ourselves to each other, nothing burdens, and thus nothing binds.

Real change requires real closeness, requires time without reward, requires boredom. The awkwardness of staying. A shot that refuses to linger cannot hope to cross the threshold that leaves a scar. The restless hand cannot hope for skin to hold its stamp. Similarly, to the endeavour of the standalone entity, we lose what is characterised by entanglement, uncertainty, indeterminism, and potentiality. By itself, bonding through trauma does not redeem us, but what comes after might.