Lumière de mes yeux

In 2012, as I was filming at the Saint-Louis hospital, I met Mahmoud who had been blinded and disfigured during the Egyptian revolution and who had come to France for treatment thanks to a humanitarian association. I filmed him over several months. Then he disappeared. What has become of him?

As often happens, this film – Sophie Bredier’s twelfth – had other titles before the one it now bears. After losing his face, Mahmoud will also lose his sight: so, the title is for him, about him, who little by little is abandoned by the light. Yet the film opted for this title rather than the simpler Mahmoud (in line with a portraiture exercise), given that two pairs of eyes are involved, not just one: the eyes of the character who can no longer see, but also those looking at him, those of the film. For the film, the light is Mahmoud. First because Sophie Bredier’s films never tire of people and rekindle their portraits in each encounter, each face, well-aware that ultimately the portrait can only ever be that of the encounter itself. So, while Lumière de mes yeux documents the fate of those sacrificed by the Egyptian revolution through Mahmoud, it focuses on the muted dependence created by this encounter of gazes. The heartrending dependence of the character (who asks the film to see for him, and rebukes the filmmaker for not looking enough, for not looking at everything) and the symmetrical dependence of the filmmaker (Mahmoud is the light of her eyes, meaning she stares at him, can’t take her filmmaker’s eyes off him, with the risk that her stare might “un-face” Mahmoud once again, Mahmoud whom everyone, be it surgeons or families, manipulates like a sad doll): in this intense meeting, always a little off the mark, what is being questioned is the gaze of documentary cinema as a whole.

Jérôme Momcilovic