How does one visualise the interior of a virus-invaded body? The experimental documentary Embodied Chorus does so with metaphors about foreignness, fruit shapes and sizes, and the great potential of double exposure. French filmmaker Danielle Davie and the Beirut-based director Mohamad Moe Sabbah work together to express the inexpressible, living with a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Giving voice to the feeling of self-destruction, of your own body self-sabotaging at a cellular level, this uneven but vital film challenges the formal limits of documentary cinema. After its IDFA premiere last year, it screened as part of the Documentary Competition at the 14th Luxembourg City Film Festival.

Davie and Sabbah rarely share a frame. At the film’s start, the two meet at a rooftop and together decide to start speaking (and filming). This act of shared consent feels empowering and sets the tone for a raw exploration of deeply private, corporeal experiences. She films herself in a diary style, either alone with the camera, her body, and her pills, or at doctors’ appointments. He, meanwhile, layers images over other images, projections over naked bodies, collages cut and pasted on top inviting a new way of imagining bodily disobedience. A virus as a butterfly, as a bubbling substance, as blood sprayed on white sheets — all these visual associations take up a life of their own in formally arresting, experimental sequences.

Melancholy and flair coexist in the 72 minutes of Embodied Chorus, and yet, they never fight each other for supremacy. More importantly, a third element is tasked with mediating the two very distinct visual expressions: five actors (men and women) give voice to actual testimonies of people living with STIs. Their narration often spills over into another film element, suggesting that such stigmatised live experiences are already intertwined. In this way, Embodied Chorus becomes an activist film, a political poem that sheds layers of shame in service of a deeper intimacy. 

HIV, HPV, queer sex, heteronormative sex, infidelity, warts, blood tests — all find mention in the film. But while these particularities ground the experiences shared in a harsh reality, Embodied Chorus prefers to tiptoe around an even harsher one: that of lifelong medicalisation and negotiating yourself with a body that betrays you. At one point, however, one testimony singles out advice given to a recently diagnosed young man: “You don’t have to tell everyone you sleep with that you’re HIV positive.” With this sentence, we see some weight lifting off his shoulders; rather than thinking of responsibility alone, there is also space for self-preservation. In a similar way, the film gestures towards care by focusing on a transitory period often closer to the diagnosis, at a stage when people are still trying to pre-empt the ways in which their lives are going to change forever. Can acceptance take root in a place (a body) where abjection reigns? Danielle Davie and Mohamad Moe Sabbah truly believe so; they also believe in the power of documentary cinema to aid that process. 

Embodied Chorus is produced by the Lebanese company Madame Le Tapis and the Berlin-based Heartwake Films, in co-production with Wild Fang Films (Luxembourg).