Amélie’s journey through childhood is crossed by presences that do not always understand her: Belgian parents unable to decipher her silences, Japanese cultural codes that remain opaque. The film stages misunderstanding as the very substance of existence. To be alive, the direction seems to suggest, means learning how to move within spaces that never fully coincide with who we are or who we wish to become.

A free adaptation of Amélie Nothomb’s novel The Metaphysics of Tubes, the film is not simply a coming-of-age story told through bright colours and a gentle rhythm: it is a small visual treatise on the weight of nothingness, on the fragility of the first human gaze, and on the way existence slowly manifests itself, like a sound learning how to become a voice.

Here, metaphysics is ironic yet radical: the human being is born as a thing, not as a subject. Consciousness is not a natural given, but a belated event.