All along, we had been playing parts, and for a period – for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person – the mechanism had held.
–from Audition, Katie Kitamura
At the end of a quietly tense and emotional confrontation with his father in Imago, director Déni Oumar Pitsaev says to him: “So, we’ll end on the fact that I’m free. And that I want to stay free.” This début feature film has an equally quiet and temperate build to what feels like a final reckoning, a long-earned resolution of a constant and looming sense of alienation Déni has felt his whole life. There is also a dissolution of the stubborn illusion that certain intimacies will ever be possible because of what’s come before, and an acceptance of the failure of certain narratives that have pinned him in place within the mythos of his family’s history.
Instead of floating uneasily through the world of his “homeland”, Déni dreams of rising skyward, like a balloon, totally untethered, the theme of spaceships and fantasies of being an astronaut only one of many what-ifs that can be uttered out loud. The complex theme in Imago of the stubborn bid for personal freedom intertwines with performance as self / self as performance, intimate portraiture against a backdrop of war, trauma, and loss that feels never-ending.
Imago explores the Chechen filmmaker’s return to his ancestral home in Pankisi, Georgia, an isolated valley at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains near the Chechen border where his mother has purchased a piece of prime land on which she expects that Déni will build a house for himself and his as-yet-unrealized wife and kids. Déni contemplates the building of this house whilst reconnecting with his Chechen relatives, and confronting his past, present and future sense of identity. The film beautifully plays with the idea that the shared reality of intimate relationships is merely the result of the performances that unfold between people, and the flawed interpretations those performances invite. Just as the film holds so much mystery and sparseness of affect in its elliptical narrative, the presence of its director is just as spare and mysterious. His is a personality that can easily inhabit a space of generating something and someone new out of the material of disguises, a place where he feels most like himself.
Déni’s mother, who also plays herself in the film, is both idée mère and mère idéale, the only safe-harbor person who has given love, protection, and stability to Déni since childhood, and is an example of how it might be possible – although difficult – to make a life that mostly severs you from tradition, that severs you from the clan. Seemingly, she yearns for that re-connection much more than Déni does, but he stays squarely in the role of intermediary, a sort of anthropologist of his own culture, navigating a possible re-entry into a homeland his mother has chosen for him. And while there is a good amount of discomfiture on his part, to his own surprise, he connects deeply with the people there.
A fragile, yet daring, film, Imago appeared in competition in 2025’s La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, winning two prizes: the Golden Eye prize for best documentary awarded by SCAM, the French organization dedicated to nonfiction filmmaking, as well as the French Touch Prize of the Jury from Critics’ Week.
Déni was born in Chechnya in 1986, a turbulent and dangerous time when the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic experienced a period of intense civic unrest and nationalist radicalization, coinciding with the onset of perestroika and the declining grip of the Soviet Union. He grew up between Grozny, the Chechen capital; St Petersburg, Russia; and Almaty, Kazakhstan, his entire life experienced as the undesired “other” no matter where he was. Now based between Paris and Brussels, he studied at the prestigious Sciences Po before turning to cinema.
After graduating with a master’s degree in audiovisual arts from the LUCA School of Arts in Belgium, Déni was at the Visions du Réel film festival with a short film called Looking for Déni, where he met Alexandra Mélot of Triptyque Films. The Orléans-based French company was created in 2010 by three young director-producers, Guillaume Massart, Thomas Jenkoe, and Charles H. Drouot. Guillaume, Alexandra, and Pierre Bompy are now at the helm of the re-configured company, which produces creative documentaries, essay films, video art, and experimental short and feature films.
Very shortly after the film’s spectacular début and victory at Cannes, I had a chance to talk to Alexandra. It turns out that, just as Imago is Déni’s feature directorial début, it is also one of Alexandra’s first films in the role of creative producer. She was a filmmaker, as well as an editor, but, as we discuss here, she’s never taken on the role of the kind of producer a personal project like this requires, and how much this opportunity changed her own destiny.
Pamela Cohn (PC): What was the genesis of your relationship with Déni and the collaboration on this project?
Alexandra Mélot (AM): From the first time I met Déni, we have been dreaming this film together. We met at Visions du Réel in 2018 where Déni was showing a short called Looking for Déni, his graduation film from LUCA, so he was very fresh. He and I started a conversation around the form and editing of his short film and it was then that I recognized something that obsessed me in my own work – the way the camera could be handled as a “thinking” body, this device that could capture the real, improvised and as sensitive as a glance, and at the same time very controlled and precise through its editing. I love that feeling in cinema. I often call it “the emotions of the framing”. Sometimes it’s not even conscious. I saw that already in his short work and this provided an immediate understanding. Since then, we’ve been discussing that over the years of working together, this way in which we could present Imago. It’s been a long writing process. As well, the film is a kind of performance, but it’s quite difficult to present that, to make clear what the intention is within that performance.
PC: Personal freedom is a central theme in the film intertwined with the type of performance you’re talking about. Can you talk a bit about working with those ideas within the confines of labeling this a documentary work? Memoir is so tricky – a constantly shifting and changing idea of the real, how we perceive our role in creating that reality, particularly the shared reality with people that are close to us. It’s an incredibly difficult concept to cinematize.
AM: We can say that, in a certain sense, the film was written into existence by Déni’s mother, arising from the gift she gave to him of this piece of land on which to build his future home. Progressively, I understood that the film could emerge from this strong will she has. For a long time, she did not want to appear in the film; she wanted to stay hidden. She appealed to me a lot as a character, but during the initial script process, Déni couldn’t really be sure that she would ultimately say yes to being in the film. Up until then, she would be there only on the telephone in conversation with him. Déni’s father ultimately also wanted to be there, but he also knew that if he did appear, she would not, in a way playing out a part of Déni’s real life, this disconnection between his father and mother.
At first, Déni really didn’t want to appear in the film, either. But he did it finally for the film, understanding he had to be the engine of it, the motor. That was a major theme in our conversations. You appear as a person in the film, but you are also the camera. The camera is your own glance on yourself. It’s a double-shift that had to be understood by the people who were operating the camera while filming. It was about creating those phantoms that appear, but also are not willing to appear, trying to control things from an internal place, but also being a physical presence. It sounds so complex, but this was part of the analysis around the direction the film could take. We could also feel it during the shooting. All these things are what we worked to define during the writing and filming processes. And even though the script had been written in this conscious-unconscious way, it shifted yet again because of the DoPs’ manner of filming, from Déni’s behavior in front of the camera. It was a very strange process.
PC: I’d like to hear more about the working relationships with those DoPs, Joachim Philippe and Sylvain Verdet. There’s a compelling push-pull at play. Sometimes the camera does feel observational in the way that is most prolific in traditional documentary filmmaking, with a constant declaration that things are being recorded. But there is also this more elevated, elegiac style of framing, all edited together in a way that gives the piece its distinctive emotional depth. There’s also an independent spirit to the camera movements that feels improvisational.
AM: Our first shootings were with Joachim, basically on what were supposed to be the scouting shoots. This could have been the film, in and of itself, because we were waiting for Déni’s father to come. For many reasons, most of them administrative, he couldn’t manage to arrive. So, the narrative became about that waiting. It felt very free because we really didn’t have much to do during this period and that gave us time to really discover this place. It gave Déni an opportunity to try things, to meet the people of the Pankisi valley. But we also had this whole team together and a really significant camera, a heavy camera, an Alexa 35. We started to understand that it might be too heavy for the film. The images shot by Joachim were absolutely beautiful and full of imagination, but for encounters with the people there, it created a distance, you could say. The other factor was that there were a lot of discussions happening in Russian and it made Joachim off-balance because he couldn’t understand what people were saying. It wasn’t totally the film he was expecting to shoot.
At first, the film was meant to be quite silent and contemplative, but then the people there really started talking a lot, progressively opening up to Déni, and he really loved that. We then proposed Sylvain Verdet to work with us in the shootings that happened a year later. Sylvain does understand Russian, and therefore could be more involved in the process and the narrative.
In terms of what form the film was taking, we would watch the rushes every day with the whole team. Déni really likes to hear comments; he’s completely open to discussion and criticism. In this turmoil then, he can find what he wants from taking that time to listen and to think. Each morning, he had ideas that came from the discussions of the evening before. He proposed that I be there during most of the shooting, and it was a pleasure for me. Included in these discussions was the position of the camera, discussing how it could find its own freedom within the frame. That was always the point – how the camera is behaving in front of Déni. How to express Déni’s emotional sensations without over-expressing them. He has a closed face; he’s not that expressive. All the emotion is happening inside. That was a huge challenge, for Joachim and Sylvain, that lack of expression. But in the edit, we understood, and we could see, that he was never the same. Many details could be seen that couldn’t be seen during the shooting.
PC: Can you share some of your experience as an emerging producer on a project like this? Chance is certainly mitigated by serious strategy and planning. Nothing’s really possible otherwise, at least not something that sustains. People are very literal, especially those in a position to fund art. This companionship in creation you speak of in your role as a producer is so essential, that weight of the responsibility of helping an artist realize their vision is something you helped to create here.
AM: This is my first film as a producer. It’s a new job for me, somehow. But it’s been six years of work on this film, along with a few others which will come out soon. It’s been a lot about chance, really, because I was offered shares in Triptyque Films by Guillaume Massart, one of the founders, at the end of the edit of In the Open [2017], a film he directed, and I edited. We bonded because it was a difficult film for him; we had experienced something important to both of us during the making of it. When he proposed I buy these company shares, I said yes without thinking, not really understanding I would become a producer. I thought I would be more of an administrator for the re-structuring of the company. But at Visions du Réel, we were presented by its artistic director, Emilie Bujès, to Déni. She said, “Here are the producers from Triptyque Films!” Afterwards, I told him I wasn’t really a producer, but that I did have shares in the company. [laughing] It didn’t really matter to him, but that’s how we began.
I really didn’t understand how much work it would be. But I feel so happy to have my initial producer experience on this film with Déni, because I love it so much. I’ve been working like a crazy person, but it gave me this huge energy. As an editor, I was always very involved in all the post-production aspects, accompanying the directors until the end, especially first-time makers or people that needed the kind of support I could offer. But I was frustrated as an editor oftentimes because I always felt that I was arriving too late, that the producer had already set the limits on how the film was to be finished based on what was planned before. If you’re not part of that planning, it can be hard.
It took a long time for Déni to write the dossier of Imago before we could submit for funding because he needed to express the probabilities of the events, the potentialities in a treatment, not in a classical linear script. So, it wasn’t easy to find its necessary form from a literary point of view. When we began to work with Mathilde Trichet, the co-writer, everything changed and started to feel more fluid. When we thought the script was strong enough, we could submit it, hoping to get funded each time, then return to re-writing. This is customary practice in France.
I tried to always plan the best scenario and schedule for the film, even for Cannes. I didn’t expect that we would be there, but I planned that we should be there. Our company had only had a first film there the year before in the ACID selection, Mona Convert’s Un pays en flammes [2024].
That’s why, from the beginning, I tried to make the ideal budget for this film, a bit like Déni’s design for his house on the land his mother bought him – conceived exactly how you dream it could be. It was a big budget from the very beginning for this kind of film. As an example, I made room in the budget for two month’s of shooting, twenty weeks of editing, eight weeks of sound editing. Having worked as an editor, I knew it was so important to have that time to artistically process, even more so for such an intimate film, to find the right distance on your own story.
So, in every possible way, I could try to anticipate what I wanted to happen for this film, you know? It was about what I wanted Déni to have, which was the very best technicians, artists and advisors around him, people that would allow him to really understand how far we could go in the creation of the images, the sound work, in all its aspects. These are not necessarily known people, but you meet them and choose to work with them because you feel they are the right people for this particular kind of film. Those relationships are everything.
As I said before, when you’re editing, you’re in this black space, keeping the secrets of the film; it feels sometimes that you are far from the real making of films in its collective aspect. Producing was this new way of working where I could really express myself as a partner and accompany the filmmakers I wanted to defend, like Déni’s vision that is so precious for me. That’s been my principal goal as well as my joy these past several years. Being at his side and having his totaland absolute confidence felt like we could go anywhere together. We then tried for the highest and finest support schemes we could because I really believed that he deserved it, that he needed it. He ended up making a film even stronger than I expected. It never lost its fragility and slenderness. I am really proud of him for accomplishing all this in order to share such a personal story.
Pamela Cohn is a Helsinki-based critic, writer, film & video curator, story structure consultant, and festival moderator. She’s the author of Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers (OR Books, New York & London, 2020), and co-producer and host of The Lucid Dreaming Podcast: Conversations on Cinema, Art & Moving Image.
