Tohé Commaret: A Cinema of Complicity

A Franco-Chilean artist based in Paris, Tohé Commaret’s film practice intertwines experimental cinema and documentary. Through her prolific production of enigmatic short features, she has developed a distinctive cinematic language that challenges traditional storytelling, narrative constructions, and visual conventions. Exploring human experience through a poetic lens, she weaves together personal and collective memory, identity, and sociopolitical themes. Her delicate interplay of image and sound creates immersive worlds where intimacy and broader societal issues converge, often blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Commaret’s work redefines cinematic expression in an era of rapid cultural and technological change. Her films interrogate art as a form of resistance, questioning power structures, marginalization, and the lasting imprint of history on contemporary identity.

Chilean heritage, brought to her by a mother who fled the Pinochet dictatorship to take refuge in France, appears in the background of most of her works. Commaret’s aesthetics and storytelling subtly recall magic realism—a genre of literature and art that originated in Latin America in the mid-20th century, blending elements of fantasy with the everyday. Her films draw deeply from folklore, mythology, and fairy tales, enriching their narratives with cultural and historical depth. Ancestors and ghosts profusely haunt her films. Some characters seem to float between two worlds, while some others seem to be possessed, or looking for something beyond reality, beyond what is visible, such young girls who keep ringing, in vain, at intercoms and doorbells of empty corridors. A hypnotic music made of layers of sounds and echoes adds to this impression of floating reality.

Suburban spaces and concrete architecture appear to play a fundamental role in the artist’s aesthetics. Growing up in Vitry-sur-Seine, in the southeast of Paris, her childhood centered around the “dalle Robespierre,” an esplanade made of concrete and surrounded by project buildings, a raw space that evokes a sense of strangeness, anxiety, and paranoia—but one still marked by social interaction. Tohé Commaret seems to have transformed the dalle into a stage where attraction and repulsion continuously interplay, a dynamic so deeply woven into her cinema that it takes on the role of a protagonist in its own right. The characters she captures, who seamlessly move from one film to another, all come from her neighborhood, with some even being childhood friends. She films kids playing and chatting on the concrete esplanade, and characters wandering around a fictional neighborhood and square that is the dalle in Vitry. Here, the artist seems to transcend both her city and neighborhood, transforming them into a surreal, undefined, and dystopian realm.

Tohé Commaret’s videos are largely unscripted, encouraging collaboration and improvisation. She captures what her characters choose to reveal about themselves. Viewing cinema as a tool for addressing injustice, she creates space for those denied visibility or a voice, giving them the opportunity to shape their own images. Her work explores the narratives we build to protect ourselves from painful truths, the identities thrust upon us, and the lengths we go to in order to break free from them. Her filmography creates a cinema of empathy and hypersensitivity, focusing on marginalized characters, in particular women and children, conveying the representation of their experiences and feelings. Her attention to feminine details can be observed in the numerous close-ups she gracefully captures on camera: details of nails, blue make-up and blue tights, platform shoes and hair pins. Some scenes exude an intense feeling of toxic masculinity and deep violence, reflecting the artist’s sensitivity to women’s pain. Children and teenagers also play central roles in Commaret’s films, bringing to the screen child and teenage characters who not only embody purity but are also portrayed as exceptionally clear-sighted, perceptive, and, most importantly, honest and unfiltered.

There is also humor and lightness in Tohé Commaret’s portrayal of sisterhood, as well as women’s complicity and solidarity. The exhibition at Batalha Centro de Cinema, features two pivotal works that blur the lines between reality and fiction: In Mustard (2023), Commaret explores the power dynamics of desire. Through a series of playful phone calls, two women orchestrate a seductive performance for an unseen client, reclaiming agency through shared wit and complicity. In contrast, Placenta Chips (2022) adopts the aesthetic of the DIY video. This unscripted vignette captures a teenage protagonist’s improvised meditation on bodily autonomy and the choice not to have children. Together, these films showcase Commaret’s ability to find the profound within the playful, interrogating how contemporary identity is forged through collective experience.