Short Films
Marie-Lou Desmeules’ short films extend her visual practice into movement, performance, and cinematic fiction. Working with transformed bodies, painted surfaces, staged characters, and symbolic environments, the films explore identity, desire, projection, and the instability of the image.
Her moving-image works have been presented in festivals and exhibition contexts internationally.
Role
Featured artist
Film festivals
Contribution
Year
2018
CATHARSIS
Directed by Los Hermanos Polo, Catharsis enters Marie-Lou Desmeules’ world through a fictional therapy session, where humor, absurdity, and artistic obsession collide. The film reflects on Desmeules’ creative process through a surreal and self-aware lens, turning transformation, identity, and inner tension into a strange cinematic confession. Catharsis has been screened internationally, including at Interfilm Festival Berlin, as part of The Long Night of Weird Shorts at Volksbühne in Berlin.
WHAT HAPPENED TO BRITNEY?
Featured in The Human Puppet, curated by David Henry Nobody Jr., What Happened to Britney? is an experimental short film by Marie-Lou Desmeules examining celebrity, spectacle, and public projection.
Using living sculpture, performance, and staged image-making, the film brings together figures inspired by celebrity culture and media obsession. Rather than offering a direct portrait, it reflects on the way fame turns real people into images to be consumed, repeated, and distorted. The work has been screened in festivals, museums, and cultural institutions internationally.
MINDSCAPES: THE CUBE
Mindscapes: The Cube explores altered perception through a confined, symbolic space. Set around an enigmatic cube, the film moves between inner vision, dream logic, and psychological disorientation. Reality becomes unstable, and the cube functions as both object and threshold — a structure through which the mind projects, fractures, and transforms. The work reflects Marie-Lou Desmeules’ interest in constructed environments, altered states, and the fragile boundary between image, perception, and inner experience.
FRANCIS BACON LAST DINNER
Francis Bacon Last Dinner is a short film by Marie-Lou Desmeules imagining a final encounter with the figure of Francis Bacon. The work enters a psychological and painterly space shaped by excess, mortality, appetite, and artistic obsession. Rather than offering a biography, the film approaches Bacon as an image: a haunted presence suspended between body, myth, and the violence of creation. Through atmosphere, performance, and visual tension, the film reflects on the artist as both subject and projection — consumed by his own legend.
A CONVERSATION THAT NEVER WAS
A Conversation That Never Was imagines an impossible dialogue between Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. Built through digital collage and fictional cinematic language, the work brings together two distinct visual worlds: suspense, dream logic, psychological tension, and the uncanny. Rather than reconstructing either filmmaker, the project stages a meeting between their images, atmospheres, and obsessions. The result is a speculative screen work about influence, memory, and the conversations that cinema continues to generate after the fact.
SEX WITH STRANGERS
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