As her sister Zara suffers a nervous breakdown, the introvert Eva takes on her job as a foley artist. Her first major assignment is to mix sound for a commercial featuring a horse. After the director’s barrage of insults, she applies herself to the task so heavily that she grows a horse tail. The new body accessory unexpectedly triggers her sexual awakening.

From the first scene onwards, Ann Oren invites us to take on a voyeuristic role, simultaneously reminding us of the power dynamic inherent to the film as a medium and to the visual pleasure it provides. Through a double gaze through a peephole, the erotic game of gaze and reversal is fixated, in which the introvert Eva ultimately takes on the role of the heartbreaker. In many respects, Eva is the soul mate of Christine, actress turned cashier in a cult porn film Variety (1983) by Bette Gordon. But her botanist lover is not turned on by pornography, but photographs of fern. In Piaffe, Oren subverts sexual conventions with a fine sense of humour and irresistible sensuality. The scenes in which various men pet her tail are both hilarious and highly erotic. Shot with a 16-mm camera, Piaffe is a visual feast for hungry eyes. Every last detail of the mise-en-scène is carefully crafted and suggestively enhanced thorugh primary colours and a plethora of horse motifs: there is a building shaped as a horseshoe, and there are people “grooming” each other and trotting on all four. Alongside Variety, Ann Oren opens the dialogue with other feminist film classics. As Giovanni Marchini Camia notices, her heroine resembles Marie from Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), and they also share the interest for the Japanese bondage art, kinbaku. But unlike Romance, which presents a dark and destructive perspective of heteronormative sexuality, Piaffe offers an irresistibly queer and playful view of sexual fantasies and realisations, simultaneously addressing the disbalance of power between sexes. As her foley artist Eva celebrates her otherness, the director herself writes a love letter to film as a form of art that, in her words, enables us to “watch through our bodies and touch with our eyes”. Oren explores new forms of sexuality and attraction – going beyond human, animal and even plant – and joyfully embraces new possibilities. (DP)

Awards and festivals: 

Locarno Film Festival (2022) – world premiere, Junior Jury Award; San Sebastian IFF (2022); BFI London Film Festival (2022); Chicago IFF (2022) – Silver Hugo, New Directors Competition: Calgary IFF (2022) – Best Film; Cork IFF (2022) – Best Film, Best Director; Achtung Berlin (2023) – Best Director, Best Production; Gerardmer Film Festival (2023) – Jury Prize