INTROVERSUS

This film is the story of my encounter with Yulia Borissova, a 28-year-old Russian woman who has suffered from agoraphobia since her teenage years. Afraid of open spaces, she has hardly ever left her own home. However, she has created a fascinating virtual world for herself through the internet, books, poetry, art, music, and above all… the Breton language. She is bilingual in Breton, to the point of being the first person not from the region to have won the Xavier de Langlais Prize, which is awarded each year to a literary work written in breton.
In March 2020, I invited her to join me in Brittany, and we travelled across Europe, which was then in the grip of the Covid epidemic. It is around this incredible paradox that the story of this film unfolds: an agoraphobic woman embarks on a journey – the first of her life – at the very moment when the world is going into lockdown, and crosses a continent as borders close one after the other… This road movie, punctuated by misunderstandings and shared joys, gives us the opportunity to discover a remarkable woman who has been labelled ‘sick’ but who ultimately proves to be much freer and braver than many of our contemporaries.