In My Room (Miu Miu Women’s Tales #20)

In My Room is a deeply introspective 20-minute short film, crafted during Mati Diop’s solitary confinement of the COVID-19 lockdown in her 24th-floor Paris apartment. Originally commissioned by the fashion brand Miu Miu as one of the film in Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series (an ongoing short film anthology series since 2011), Diop blends intimate storytelling with the experience of a global crisis, enabling a solipsistic and personal meditation on isolation, memory, and the threads of human connection. Through recordings of conversations with Diop’s grandmother, Maji, who unfortunately passed away a few months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the film combines the poignant narration of a woman who lived alone for 20 years with the distressing lockdown reality. “Paris is the best city in the world for music and yet we go nowhere. And we’re going to die. Isn’t that silly?” (07:22–07:31), Maji says in the recording. Her lament resonates with the paralysis and stasis of life during lockdown, where everything stands in silent mundanity. The recorded voice often blurs Maji’s paranoia in the past with the dystopian present, establishing an existential parallel to pandemic self-isolation. “It’s hard to die alone” (17:44), Maji reiterates. This candid line exposes the raw nerves of modern solitude, which were obviously intensified when one is entrapped in a forced sanctuary and when the sense of time no longer feels linear.

The film’s power lies in its quiet, voyeuristic intimacy—during lockdown, Diop’s living rooms become stages where life is performed like a soliloquy, and windows become a portal for her that holds a desperate, disconnected gaze outwards. Fragments of the city are shown, but all of them are distant and unreachable. There is a scene when Diop, clad in a glamorous Miu Miu designer piece, stands alone in her living room, and dramatically lip-syncs to “Sempre Libera” from Verdi’s La Traviata. It echoes Maji’s previous wish to go to the opera: “But you see, we’re wrong not to be on the move, not to go to the Opera, not to spend money on doing things like that” (02:51–02:57). Violetta’s defiant aria, where the courtesan rejects Alfredo’s love, and continues her free and luxurious life forges an interesting multi-layered metaphor for pandemic isolation and female autonomy. During lockdown, luxury is without occasion, beauty is without witness. The film poetically ends with a bird flying among the Parisian cityscape, offering an ironic contrast to the restrained freedom and lockdown solitude. Diop bottles the nihilistic ache of confinement and quarantine.