SCRITCH SCRITCH

Chloé wanted to highlight my vision of human vulnerability—the inevitable, laced with poetry and humor, even though, no matter what, the planet is burning. This project isn’t an accusatory film; instead, it paints a generational portrait in the face of the ecological catastrophe we’re living through. She was shaped by the stories and post-Chernobyl anecdotes of her parents and their friends. "When you listen to them, it’s like the cloud just skirted around our beautiful country... My ass!" her mother would say, laughing bitterly.

She writes with the urge to speak about her generation—raised in artificial environments, yet obsessively trying to reconnect with nature through various mediums, all without leaving their homes. It’s about our generation’s relationship with the irreversible: the last eternal snows (an oxymoron of the present), congenital malformations, the rising tide of cancers, species extinction... And yet.

Scritch Scritch was born during lockdown. One evening, between the 8 p.m. news—flashing infection rates and the weather forecast—slipped a tiny segment, a brief report on life in Rouen after the Lubrizol plant fire, which had happened just months before the COVID-19 pandemic began. She imagined the surrounding nature and how life might have frozen in the wake of that disaster. She started writing little scenes, seen through the eyes of a fictional character, Aurore—a young urban woman she could identify with, exaggerating her quirks to the point of absurdity. She walked through the forest, imagining the mental trajectories of this hyper-connected yet isolated woman, lost in her world of amplified noises.

Chloé loved the idea of a sudden, deep interest in nature—perhaps out of guilt, a feeling her generation often grapples with. She wanted to give it form in a film, to weave it into a narrative framework, and to let Aurore carry a story. Making Aurore an ASMR professional provides a formal structure for her monologues. Plus, Chloé finds the practice both soothing and excruciatingly painful. Scritch Scritch is also the sound of gentle scratches, a longing for tenderness in a world that’s literally exploding in our faces. It’s a dark comedy where snippets of lives collide in the wrong place, at the wrong time.