St. Moritz Art Film Festival

In Bright Heart, a short film produced in 2023, Tarek Lakhrissi continues his work around a queer aesthetic combining formal research, representations of minorities (queer and racialized) and a critical vision of our societies. Summoning the imagination and the codes of fantastic cinema, the artist and poet follows the nocturnal stroll of a young man quickly threatened by a mysterious helmeted motorcyclist. Finding refuge in an empty museum (in this case the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris), he makes several decisive encounters there: two female vampires who declaim a poetic and committed text, as well as a gogo-dancer with a body of man but with the face of a dinosaur.

In its seductive form, Bright Heart follows the journey of a character towards self-affirmation and his own power (through the allegorical figure of the vampire) but also the awakening of a political and social conscience. Mixing contemporaneity and time immemorial, references to queer icons from both pop culture (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and contemporary art (Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his famous performance "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) by 1991), Tarek Lakhrissi composes with Bright Heart an initiatory tale hybrid and polished, political and intimate.