Some films feel as though they were made just for you. Or rather, they exist within a constellation where sensibilities converge, align, or intertwine. This can happen through similarities that are sometimes striking—both unsettling and delightful. That was my feeling when I discovered The Secret Garden.

Let’s take a closer look... As Nour Ouayda explains in an interview for the cinema journal Débordements, her film began with a slow, attentive gaze toward a single object. The more one looks at this object, "the stranger it begins to appear—this is especially true with plants when you focus on their details. It all lends itself to these games of strange and mysterious stories."

In a similar vein, I began photographing the plants in the new neighborhood I moved to last summer. Its climbing plants. Paying attention to this particular type of vegetation allowed me to fill the void left by the beloved wooded area of my previous neighborhood, while also immersing myself in the strangeness and mystery offered by this new environment. Amid the urban dominance of these streets and alleyways, I felt a need to be invaded.

Through this photographic collection, I slowly began imagining the best way to reinterpret a narrative of invasion—specifically, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. True to an epidemiological paradigm, this story also seemed in tune with our era of fatigue (see The Burnout Society, 2014, Byung-Chul Han). Imagine my surprise and delight to find a direct reference to this cult film in The Secret Garden, where the imaginary characters of the two friends take up a dialogue about resisting sleep. For it is in this drowsiness that the Body Snatchers replace the bodies of their victims with new, transformed copies. The transformative potential of sleep…

The Secret Garden hovers on the edge of documentary through the unpredictability of speculative fiction—a term often used to describe science fiction. Simplistically put, it arrives at this equation: science (plants and documentary) minus fiction—all stretched across the vegetal entanglement. And thus grows, renewed, this magnificent quote by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."

Emmanuel Bernier
Head of Acquisitions at Tënk
and loony bird

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