Christian Renaud

A young man, the soldier and bachelor type, is looking for Anima - the eternal unattainable female who alternately appears as a virgin, harlot, mother, saint but also as a witch. In his illusions and visions made up of images which are multi-layered and ambiguous, Anima changes from a romantic ideal to a technically two dimensional duplicate which can be reproduced and is half woman, half sewing machine.

"The State of happiness... permanent" presents itself as an extremely composed cine-photo-novel, based on the life of the filmmaker. It is, very exactly, images and sounds extracted from his personal story (curiously mixed with History itself). Not a plan that is not a piece of flesh, a piece of memory, a piece of life. Not a plan that does not fit into the raw experience of Maria Koleva. From this film, I want to highlight two very beautiful sequences: the one where she writes an essay with her cameraman on the back of a man sleeping in his bed, the one where she wonders, based on a photo where we see her as a little girl with her family during some party (in which his father seems to have played an important role), on the hat worn that day by his mother.