This Is My Heart (Ceci est mon coeur)

This Is My Heart is the contemporary tale of an extraordinary love story, that of a child’s reconciliation with his body. A sensory and narrative creation that highlights the distorted representation we have of our own bodies.

Conceived as a collective site-specific work, This Is My Heart is an installation designed for cultural and artistic centers and immersive spaces. An immersive tale in which the public, wrapped in a connected garment and embellished with luminous embroidery, is carried away in a poetic experience, both oral and visual. This Is My Heart offers a sensory odyssey in which the audience sees the connected garment light up in sync with the text of the story. A ballet of lights takes shape under the impulse of the story, a story conceived as a dialogue between the narrator and his own body. This Is My Heart is an immersive work of the intimate, whole and organic: whether it’s the visual projections, the soundscape or the choreography of light that moves through the audience’s bodies, everything seems to breathe and react to the story. This immersive tale lasts 35′ and is accessible to all audiences.

The installation continues at the off-boarding stage with a series of photographic portraits. A series of 12 portraits of young adults, who, through the photographer’s lens, dramatize the story they construct with their own bodies.

This Is My Heart showcases the beauty of human fragility and emphasizes self-acceptance.

The Directors

Nicolas Blies & Stéphane Hueber-Blies

In 2015, they conceptualised the documentary music transmedia Soundhunters in co-production with ARTE. Soundhunters was designed to transform the world into an infinite musical instrument. The transmedia was released in 2015 in collaboration with a number of international artists including Jean Michel Jarre, Simonne Jones and Blixa Bargeld. In 2016, the Blies brothers were invited to present their work at Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival. In 2016, the project was placed under the patronage of UNESCO.

In 2019, they wrote and directed their first feature-length documentary Zero Impunity about the impunity of sexual violence in wartime (Thessaloniki IFF, Annecy IFF, Moscow IFF, Mostra de Sao Paulo, Guadalajara IFF, Palm Springs IFF…). A hybrid of animation and live action, the film is considered to be one of the pioneering films of its kind, particularly for its ability to “represent the unimaginable”. The Blies brothers were invited by the Annecy International Animated Film Festival to take part in the festival’s traditional “Cinema Lessons” to talk about “sexual violence in animation”. In 2021, the film was nominated for the Trophées Francophones du Cinéma in the “Best Documentary” category.

In 2024, the Blies brothers released the digital art installation This Is My Heart, about the reconciliation of a child with his body, mixing video-mapping and connected clothing. Following Zero Impunity, here again they hybridize animation and live action. For the first time, they also use a technique akin to “Spoken Word”. Combining Stéphane’s poetic writing with Nicolas’s musical creations, they explore a fusion of words and rhythms at the service of storytelling.

The Blies brothers decided to pursue their research into Spoken word and visual hybridization in the development of their first two feature-length films, Aimer moins and Maman Sopra.