The sap under our tongues / La Sève (sous ta langue)

The Sap Under Our Tongues unfolds as a series of encounters. An encounter between two boys, two cellmates who were never meant to meet, yet who quickly become unable to exist without one another. An encounter with a queer mythology from the past, reawakened and confronted with today’s carceral, racial, and queer realities. And above all, an encounter between two friends, a filmmaker and a cinematographer, who choose to make a film together by tracing what a poetic reinterpretation of one of our queer cinematic roots can still offer.

Drawing from A Song of Love, Jean Genet’s 1950 film on male homosexual desire, the film engages with the idea of encounter as contrast, two beings held apart, yet constantly pulled toward one another. It seeks to extract what was already present in Genet’s work, its latent force, its sap, and apply it to what continues to resonate today, individually, collectively, and within the community.

At its core, The Sap Under Our Tongues follows the meeting of Warda, a young Lebanese refugee, and Ange, a young white delinquent. Everything separates them, starting with language. Forced together by circumstance and a shared desire to escape, survival as much as emancipation, they find moments of freedom through flight, just as Genet found freedom through imagination.

The film explores desire without psychology, choosing simplicity over explanation. It unfolds through closeness and isolation, through chiaroscuro, and through careful attention to gestures, movements, and glances where words fall short. By withdrawing language, it opens another form of communication, one that allows bodies to reconnect and boundaries to blur.