IL Y AURA (There will be)

IL Y AURA (There will be), 2022, is a film inspired by absurdist Eugène Ionesco’s play La Leçon, 1951. In a Parisian apartment, a young pupil arrives in an older professor’s home for an ambiguous ritualised language lesson. She is invited to read her ‘exercises’ and begins to nervously recite a series of sentences in French all beginning with il y aura (there will be). The sentences describe various scenes that ‘will be’ in the future and act as a script, as copies of which they both hold on to and constantly refer to. The professor initially corrects his student on grammar and pronunciation but becomes increasingly personal and probing. The phrases get more surreal as the professor starts to behave more animated, erratic and sinister. The English subtitles playfully clarify points of accuracy and error, appearing in white, yellow and red.

The film stars French actor Thibault de Montalembert (Call my Agent, 2015-present; All Quiet on the Western Front, 2022; My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument, 1996) and the artist herself. This artwork has emerged from the artist’s personal experience as a bilingual Franco-British person brought up in the UK. Conflating fiction, personal experience and memory with a refusal to offer clear narrative resolutions, this film draws on intimate elements of Theobald’s French heritage and the experience of gradually losing her mother tongue as well as pedagogical power dynamics and the insufficiency of language.

At its most delirious, IL Y AURA (There will be) comments on social customs, clichés, learnt modes of behaviour and the cyclical nature of producing fiction whilst simultaneously being produced by it. Shot on Super 16mm and using handheld camera, the film has the aesthetic of a home movie, characteristic of Theobald’s previous recorded performance works. IL Y AURA (There will be) is written, directed and edited by the artist and is her first French language film. The film’s score is written with musician Tom Hirst (American Sound/ Design a Wave).