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“La Fille du Train” is a film-based portrait series capturing the quiet intensity of a woman shedding her past—between serpent skins, smoke, and the silence that follows a breakup.
This series was born from a chance encounter, the kind that takes you back in time, and towards new destinations.
We met on a train, between my departure and her arrival. Iuliana, with her hair freshly cut short, coat too large, luggage in disarray.
Me, eyes fixed on my own recent breakup, watching the rails blur past.
In her, I saw the mirror of my own goodbyes: that precise moment when you
sense a woman won’t go back.
I, in half-silence; she, frontal, raw, burning.
I recognized myself in her, at that exact age when you shed your skin
without yet knowing what you’re leaving behind or where you’re headed.
Very quickly, she revealed herself to me.
She wanted to show this change, to inscribe it physically into images…
The shoot took place at my place the next day: a closed, protective
space, almost womb-like, where she could lay down what she was leaving
behind.
A snakeskin weaves through the series as metaphor of the Chinese New
Year, of mourning, of the necessary act of shedding one’s old skin to
keep moving forward.
At times, a faint wisp of smoke drifts into the frame, like a breath, an
ephemeral trace, something dissolving while the body transforms.
Between cocoon and unveiling, the body becomes a surface of passage.
A suspended moment, fragile, aware, just before taking flight.
The exact instant when the old skin no longer holds.