By turns evoking, incarnating and calling upon the avant-garde life and work of American writer Gertrude Stein, this masterful film from Arnaud des Pallières is above all an exercise in storytelling, recounted through a collage of luminous selections from her many pieces of writing.

Diving unabashedly into the labour of words, des Pallières lets us hear Stein’s vibrant and vibrating literature—brilliantly brought to life by voice actors Micheline Dax and Michael Lonsdale—which explores a poetic and organic relationship to the world through impressionistic fragments.

Walking a line between documentary portraiture and film essay, Is Dead successfully brings feelings and memories buried within each of us to the surface, winding back the clock through a biography that gradually transforms into a strange journey into the archives of the 20th century.

Originally filmed as an episode of the French television series Un siècle d’écrivain (“A Century of Writers”), this commissioned work represents a creative experiment in what the “small screen” can do; its freedom and eloquence leaving an afterglow of what we may be missing today.

Terence Chotard
Filmmaker

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