My Life on Ice

Étienne, who lives with his mother in Rouen, is given a video camera by his grandmother when he turns sixteen. From then on he films everything: his training at the ice rink, his friends, his mother and his geography teacher. His original plan is to bring his mother and the teacher together. As the recordings pile up he begins to see where his own interest actually lies. Directed together by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, the film is told entirely through that camera; the images look like the boy's own footage. The telling makes an adolescent realising his own inclination neither a crisis nor a scene of disclosure; it all moves at its own pace. Ariane Ascaride plays the mother. It screened at Locarno in 2002.