Touch

A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a homosexual, an observer, an impersonator. He spends his time collecting images - his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we watch them and share his cloak of invisibility, both an advantage and a curse. An essay told from the point of view of one man, Touch is also a fiction, for this man is an invented person, an amalgam of research, interviews, off-the-record comments, secrets, implausibilities and floating desires. This man, who never tells us his name, returns as both an insider and a stranger to a neighbourhood from which he escaped as a teenager as quickly as he could.

"Chinatown, New York. A man is watching. In a voice-over in Chinese, he recalls his past in the district where he was born and which he left fifty years ago. Windows, sidewalks, fire escapes, the stars of locally shot autobiographical films whom the observer enlists as “his extras”… The photographic poetry of the film’s urban inserts almost makes us forget to ponder on the narrator himself, on his loquaciousness, which is made even more obvious by the silent intertitles. In this film made by a woman filmmaker, the man – a librarian, homosexual, Chinese-speaking – is an invention. But as he says, talking about an entirely different subject, “words enable you to imagine the impossible”. The documentary bite thus leaves its mark – the man exists, through the power of a voice that builds “a machine for watching, a machine that teaches me how to watch”. By staking her right to documentary material as well as fictional writing, Shelly Silver sizes up the likelihood of an imaginary point of view reaching a truth more subtle than autobiographical truth. “I’m looking for a lie that will reveal the world” (these words are spoken by the man, of course…)."
(Charlotte Garson - Cinéma du réel 2013)