In her feature debut, Body of Glass, screening in San Sebastián’s New Directors strand, Naëmi Ada follows Tian, a dancer attempting to escape a suffocating relationship by assuming another identity. Ada discusses the boundary between performance and truth, the visibility of violence, and her physical approach to directing actress Soma Pysall.

Cineuropa: How would you describe Body of Glass without revealing too much?
Naëmi Ada: It is the story of a woman attempting to flee a relationship that is suffocating her by assuming another life and trying to adopt another personality. It is also about somebody whose own boundaries have been washed away so completely that she has forgotten what boundaries mean, both for herself and for other people. As a result, she begins to overstep other people’s boundaries as well.

The film brings together performance, domestic violence and grief. How did those elements become connected?
Performance is public and constantly watched, whereas domestic violence is imagined as something that happens behind closed doors and grief, at least in Western European culture, as something personal. I wanted to place domestic violence on a visible, exposed platform. Most of the film is shot in the light: what is happening could be seen, but people choose to look away.

I come from the dance world, where being constantly observed creates a very fragile state. You get accustomed to being looked at, but can forget what it means to be truly perceived or seen. That can become a dangerous breeding ground for secrets because everything appears to be exposed when it actually is not.

The boundary between truth and performance also seems to disappear for Tian.
Soma Pysall and I spoke a great deal about lies. We never approached anything Tian does as a lie, even though it is factually untrue, because there is always a lot of truth in every untruth she creates. She is grieving, too. She is not grieving what she claims to be grieving, but the idea of a love she had, or believed she had, and can no longer have.

How did you and Pysall construct the character?
Soma was the first person to attend the casting, and I immediately fell in love with her performance. At a second casting, we danced together, and I felt we could go anywhere.

Our work was very physical. One of our first rehearsals involved practising how to fall from a chair. Rather than inventing a detailed biography, we asked: how does she enter a room? How does she sit? How does she wear her fear? Where does pain reside in her body? We then carried those discoveries into the scenes.

What did the dance setting bring to the story?
The choreography was created by Marie Bourgeois, with whom I studied around 13 years ago. We worked mainly with dancers from the Ballet National de Marseille, as well as some dancers in Berlin. The camera also had to be choreographed, so we worked spontaneously with the physical possibilities and limitations of both the dancers and the camera.

At dance school, you live inside a bubble that distorts the importance of everything. A misunderstanding can feel existential because there is little outside life to put it into perspective. It is also an international environment: people often live abroad, as Tian does, and its intensity leaves little time for another life. This heightens her situation.

How did you approach the music and the film’s mixture of languages?
Ralph Heidel composed the music, and two singers and I recorded sounds for it. I wanted voices, organic textures and bodily sounds, so the music seemed to emerge from the scenes, rather than being imposed on them.

The multilingualism happened organically. My world is now trilingual. I wrote mostly in English, but adapted the dialogue to the actors and the moments when they would naturally change language. On set, all of us were switching constantly; I sometimes directed in three languages within one sentence, and that simply became the film’s style.

Tian finds an unexpected form of care among the grieving characters.
She encounters tenderness that asks for nothing in return. Each member of the group grieves differently, without judging the others’ needs. We have many preconceived ideas about what pain should look like, how a survivor of abuse should behave or how somebody who has lost a loved one should appear. Here, Tian can experience connection and relief alongside her guilt: a respite from a world demanding a clear answer as to who is good and who is bad.