Near Geneva, seven girls on the verge of adulthood recall in their rooms the words and dances of TikTok that shaped their youth. Between intimate and collective memory, they drift from room to room, dancing through a final suspended night as they search for connection and identity, pushing their gestures to the edge.
Year of production 2026 Length 12' CountrySwitzerland/France Shooting FormatDigital Aspect Ratio 1.5:1 Dialogue French, English
Directors Anna-Marija Adomaitytė and Élie Grappe Producers Lionel Baier and Jaber Debzi (Bande À Part Films), Anna-Marija Adomaityte (Cie A M A), Thomas Carillon (Micro Climat) Production Companies Bande À Part Films, Cie A M A, Micro Climat Writers Anna-Marija Adomaitytė and Élie Grappe Director of Photography Lucie Baudinaud Editor Suzana Pedro Music Jeanne Pâris & Gautier Teuscher Sound RecordingIlù Seydoux Sound Editing Yatoni Roy Cantú Sound Re-Recording Maxence Ciekawy Color GradingJulian Nouveau Production Manager Lavinia Johnson Cast Adriana Amos, Lou Bertossa. Mégane Belomo, Charlotte Laurient, Edith Nordmann, Louane Pericot, Alessia Pierdomenico
Director's Statement At the very moment you are reading this, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of young people are filming themselves, dancing to the latest trending choreographies, repeating viral punchlines, and feeding the algorithms of the TikTok machine. At the age when one is still searching for oneself, these teenagers, hungry for interaction, stage themselves for a few seconds in front of the camera as if before a mirror, offering themselves to the gaze of an invisible crowd on the other side of the screen. I THINK YOU SHOULD BE HERE stems from a long-term research project initiated through a contemporary dance performance by Anna-Marija Adomaitytė, TikTok-Ready Choreographies, featuring the same seven protagonists. As they grew older, the film sought to capture this pivotal moment: What does it mean today to stand at the twilight of an adolescence shaped and irrigated by social media? What can be done with all these gestures, all these accumulated words? And what if, by inviting users to exhaust the vocabulary of TikTok that has inhabited their lives, the violence of that experience were to reveal itself — alongside a sincere desire for interaction and a strange latent collective power within these soon-to-be adults? The intention was to embody these questions through a sensory, intense, and non-didactic experience. Together with the protagonists, and all the way through the editing process with Suzana Pedro, we conceived the film as a danced and sung ritual toward adulthood, a moment of wondering about what will remain of one’s childhood. PROTAGONISTS We met the protagonists in 2023, when they were still teenagers, thanks to casting director Minna Prader. Very quickly, they shared with us the ambivalence of their relationship to TikTok’s cyberspace: at once a place of joy and violence, solitude and exchange, creation and normalization, influence and emancipation. Full of life and doubts, they moved us deeply, and together we built a strong bond of trust. TikTok users — especially young girls — are often commented on or stigmatized, yet very little room is given to their own interpretation of this experience. We wanted the elements composing the film to come directly from the protagonists themselves and to be shaped through a process of collective creation. They first introduced us to their TikTok repertoire: phrases drawn from trends, dances, and “facings” — facial expressions codified by the platform. They then explored ways of reclaiming and reappropriating this vocabulary differently. We worked from their memories, both beforehand and on set, asking them for example to recall old gestures they used in their early days as TikTok creators. We were struck by their sharpness, intelligence, and humor… We learned so much from these young people, both lucid and resilient, in the midst of forming their political vision of the world. Despite the harshness of what they recount, they also give us hope. Drawing from many hours of interviews with the protagonists, we collectively wrote a text for the film — a kind of intimate yet collective journal of their TikTok experience. It is composed of personal stories intertwined with words and expressions from the application that left a mark on them. VOICE-OVER Throughout the film, we also hear a chorus of voices surrounding us. These are the girls collectively repeating trends from the platform. A language of their own, sometimes brushing against spheres of adult references, sometimes not. By playfully performing and diverting these quotations together, they lay bare the platform’s injunctions and their strangeness. MUSIC For the vocal work, the girls collaborated with vocalist and musician Jeanne Pâris through games and improvisations. We recorded in a church in order to create the sensation of a vast echo chamber, without using effects on the voices. An electronic score composed by Gautier Teuscher also enters the film, built from countless TikTok fragments collected from the girls. It is as though old musical trends, forgotten in the application’s cloud and summoned back by the protagonists, returned to dance together one last time — with them. BEDROOMS In preparation for the film, the girls identified their bedrooms as the quintessential place where they were “on” TikTok. They scrolled there for hours, day and night, danced there, and shared content there. A floating space between physical and digital life — an in-between world. More concretely, it is also a place they are about to leave behind as they enter adulthood. Together with cinematographer Lucie Baudinaud, we searched for a counterpoint to the smartphone point of view, so that we could feel, differently with each of them, this suspended moment.
