Director Adina Pintilie’s Golden Bear-winning first feature film Touch Me Not offers up a provocative look at bodies, intimacy, and empathy, exploring the private lives and sexual desires of four seemingly unusual people with an approach that blurs the line between fiction and documentary.
Touch Me Not centers on a filmmaker (Pintilie herself) and characters she documents who together venture into a deep, personal soul-searching into how to achieve real human intimacy.
On the fluid border between reality and fiction, the film follows the emotional and sexual journeys of various, diverse subjects offering deeply empathic insights into their personal lives.
Craving intimacy – yet also deeply afraid of it – they each work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos… to cut the cords of inhibition and finally be set free.
“When I was twenty, I thought I knew everything about love, about how a healthy intimate relationship should be, how desire functions,” said Pintilie. “Today, after twenty years of trials and tribulations, all the views that I had on intimacy back then lost their definition and grew more and more complex and unsettlingly contradictory. As a reflection of this personal journey, Touch Me Not is an artistic research about the human longing and yet inability to touch and be touched, to make contact.”
Watch the trailer for Touch Me Not below and click here to pre-order your copy. The film is coming to DVD in April.