As a huge fan and collector of minimalist and electronic music, as well as ambient sound, I’ve always been particularly drawn to repetition, to music that seems to circle around the same gesture rather than constantly moving forward. At the same time, I think my relationship to sound also comes from something very intimate and personal.

I’ve had severe tinnitus since I was eighteen, which gradually led me towards a more introspective practice and to a strange – still ongoing – attempt: archiving different forms of silence.

I like the idea that every silence has its own shape, texture, and colour. Over time, I became less interested in silence as an absence of sound and more interested in what it contains.

The silence before hearing someone stutter is probably the purest form of silence I have ever encountered. For me, it is charged with anticipation, effort, breath, and infinite possibilities. Perhaps this is where my interest shifted from music towards language: I began to hear speech not only as meaning, but as a material.

I also became interested in the possibility that silence can move across scales – from the individual to the collective, from the body to history. A silence never necessarily belongs to one person alone – it can be shaped by larger structures of memory, language, and power. In that sense, an interruption in speech can resonate beyond the body that produces it, opening onto what a community has chosen, learned, or been compelled not to articulate.

Silence then becomes less an absence than a form of transmission. The intimate and the political are no longer separate scales, but different expressions of the same silence.

We sometimes confuse silence with absence, and it was important for me to think about silence as a space where attention can be collectively reorganised.

While making the film, I became very interested in theorist Yves Citton’s work on the ‘ecology of attention’. For him, attention is not simply an individual and limited resource: it is shaped by the environment, media, and collective structures in which we live. In a context of informational abundance, the question is not only what captures our attention, but what kinds of attention we are learning to develop.

From this perspective, I started to think of stuttering as an attentional practice, and maybe even as a form of resistance to the idea of attention as currency. Fluent communication encourages us to move quickly through language, extracting meaning and moving on. Stuttering interrupts this fluency, this circulation. It introduces another temporality.

There is something quite political to me in allowing someone else’s rhythm to reorganise your own attention. The main topic of the film perhaps exists there, rather than in any explicit statement or position: I like the idea that opal doesn’t project an opinion onto Sonny, the main actor of the film, but instead defends his words by allowing them to exist only within the rhythm he imposes.

As a visual artist, I’m also interested in starting from a documentary element: a voice, a body, a lived experience, a place… and then building an aesthetic universe around it. For me, the aesthetic dimension is not there to embellish the documentary material, but to create a space in which new dimensions can emerge. An active tension between hyperrealism and surrealism, if I may say so.

When writing the film, I discovered this post-game interview of a soccer player called Ken Sema, who has a stutter. I love this moment as the journalist starts asking about his performance but the way that he answers is what a normal person would consider the opposite of an ‘actual performance’: mimics, shattered voices, ruptures, time stretching – things that, in another context, might even be laughed at or perceived as failure.

It creates a natural moment of brutal empathy that is, for me, very complex and pure at the same time. The position of the journalist in this specific context becomes very intriguing and gets deeply interrogated.

It made me question our attachment to fluency, control and power to some extent. We tend to treat fluency as the natural or ideal state of communication, when it is also a convention, a rhythm we collectively expect language and other people to follow. When that rhythm breaks down, we suddenly become aware of all the things that fluency usually makes invisible.

It is for me connected to Gilles Deleuze’s idea of creative stuttering: the distinction between someone who stutters in language and a writer who makes language itself stutter. Here, stuttering is not a failure of language but a creative process. Through repetition, hesitation, interruption, and instability, language is pushed away from its usual function of clear communication and made strange to itself.

I was introduced a few years ago to contemporary American poetry by someone very important in my life, and through that, I discovered the work of Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Tracy K. Smith, Maggie Nelson, and many others.

But Fariha’s work struck me in a very particular way. There was a vulnerability in it, and a relationship to the body, that felt completely unique to me.

I never really approached the poem as something that needed to be interpreted or translated into images. I was more interested in deeply listening to it. In that sense, I indeed treated it more like a musical score, something with its own changes of intensity. I wanted the film to inhabit those movements rather than explain them. This shifting intensity is also connected to the title of the film, to the opal itself, and the way its iridescence changes depending on the light and the angle from which it is seen.

There is something very physical in Fariha’s writing, for me. The words seem to carry their own breath and their own internal tempo, and I wanted to leave enough space around them for that to remain perceptible. The film doesn’t try to illustrate the poem; it somehow tries to listen to it.

I like the idea that titles and subtitles can become a medium in themselves. I’m not inventing anything here, this has been explored and conceptualised by many artists, Duchamp notably. But I’ve always had this instinct to take language apart. I always did it for fun when I was young with my little brother, and later with friends, almost as a form of a private and safe language with them. I still do it every day. So punctuation, typography, and the visual shape of words have always felt quite physical to me, rather than simply graphic choices.

This film is also, in some way, an homage to French writer Ghérasim Luca, who was living in my street in the 18th arrondissement in Paris. He was constantly breaking language apart, pushing language, letters, phonemes towards an almost ecstatic form of reading.

In the case of opal, I like the idea that lowercase communicates a form of reduction not only of volume, but of the event itself. This reduction doesn’t necessarily diminish the experience; on the contrary, it can expand our perception.

So the lowercase suggests a scale, a volume – perhaps even an attitude towards attention. In that sense, the visual form of the title is already part of the work.

A very special moment happened during the casting process. I had a final conversation with Sonny, the main figure in the film, who has a stammer. He simply asked me why I was making this film. I suddenly realised that, throughout all those years of writing, researching, and producing the project, nobody had ever really asked me that question. Something shifted in that moment.

I had spent so much time asking other people to articulate their relationship to words, silence, and stammering, and suddenly Sonny reversed that position: he was asking me to articulate mine. I entered a strange zone, almost of transcendence, where I had to confront my own reasons for making the film rather than intellectualise them. Now that I think about it, I love the fact that the casting director was on the call witnessing this discussion – this moment of revelation between us. Her silence was the opposite of absence, or perhaps she was trying to make herself absent…

I think that encounter changed something fundamental in the way I listen. It made me realise that listening is not a neutral or passive position.