A very real lover of household YouTube, Gabrielle Stemmer also calms down in front of the hundreds of videos of these North American housewives who tidy up, clean and polish their interiors for the pleasure of their millions of subscribers. Having become familiar with the artificial daily life of cleaning influencers, she wanted to question these images and the behind the scenes of a strange internet fashion phenomenon by questioning femininity and depression. To make her graduation film, the graduate director of the editing section of the Fémis had to respect a constraint imposed by the school: to integrate archival images into his project and to exploit the multitude of pre-existing images. His documentary film, entitled Clean with Me (Ater Dark), is therefore exclusively shot on a computer screen, and its narrative framework consists solely of archive videos available on the Internet. After winning several festival awards, he is currently available free of charge and in full on Tënk.Inspired by the feature film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels by Chantal Akerman, which filmed the alienating daily life of a Brussels widow and mother governed by repetitive tasks, Gabrielle Stemmer scrutinizes without any cynicism these not very #Metoo household influencers who perform the household act in video challenges. But very quickly, this ingenious and silent montage, without any commentary or interview, will sketch another story, and Gabrielle will tell us into the darker and less clean corners of these women’s daily lives. On the lookout for details that betray the flaws in their perfect life, she tries to understand what is happening behind the clean windows of the dapper houses in highly movie-loving American suburbs that she scrutinizes on Google Maps. Because for many of these influencers, cleaning also has a therapeutic vocation, and their videos are above all an opportunity to deceive their loneliness as housewives and to confide in their discomfort, their anxiety and their mental load. With Clean with Me (Ater Dark), Gabrielle Stemmer recycles pre-existing images to compose a patchwork that questions these new models of femininity without judging them.
