Touch Me Not

The big winner at the 2018 Berlinale, this film straddles the very thin, often invisible, line between documentary and fiction. In her filmmaking debut, Adina Pintilie embarks on a therapeutic investigation of human intimacy. Raising questions regarding cinema’s intimate relationship with the human body, Pintilie offers a more compassionate alternative to the camera lens’s inherently exploitive gaze. Perhaps it is precisely the film’s exceptionally meticulous aesthetic that challenges common conceptions of beauty, aesthetics, and attractiveness. In a year in which the MeToo campaign peaked, this film is an original cinematic response that deepens the current debate on the body, relationships, sexuality, and liberated intimacy.