Touch Me Not

The big winner at the 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.