A Tress of Hair (2008)
Single-channel digital film projection, 16:9, 11 min 48 sec

A Tress of Hair is based on two short stories by 19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant: La Chevelure (A Tress of Hair) and Berthe (Bertha). In A Tress of Hair, a young man becomes obsessed with a lock of hair he finds hidden in an old cabinet. Alone in his apartment, he caresses it, craving the “cold, slippery, irritating, bewildering contact” — longing not only for the tress but for the unknown woman it once belonged to. His feverish communion with the object escalates into delirium. When he ventures outside, he is swiftly confronted by reality, arrested, and confined to an asylum. The story is narrated by a physician there, reading the recovered memoirs of the madman.

A Tress of Hair is a tale of repressed carnal desire and the trespassing of private mania into the public realm. In the film, roles dissolve and reconfigure — every character becomes, in turn, passive, vulnerable, commanding. Communication turns into imitation, forming an allegorical triangle of subjects and objects, excess and lack. The film probes the interplay between curiosity and compulsion, tracing the fine line between choice and madness. This project was commissioned by PhotoCairo 4: The Long Shortcut.