Bye, Bye Confidence

Within the confines of a small south London flat, the filmmaker decides to finally say goodbye to her already lacking confidence and her friends come together to help her see this task through. Structured as a succession of informal conversations and exchanges between friends, Bye Bye Confidence opens up a space for un-mastering and un-learning expected behaviours. 　　By putting a spell on cinema Mădălina Zaharia made a film whose protagonists remain unseen, but make themselves felt from outside the frame. One of these protagonists is the filmmaker herself, as Bye Bye Confidence is a nonconventional personal project — not a suffocatingly intimate one, but a film about the other, about communion, giving all the time and the screen to her friends. The other protagonist is the confidence, or rather self-confidence, to which she says goodbye through all sorts of rituals, serious and yet playful make-believes, some of which intellectual, like making the word itself disappear under a lost perfect synonym, and some magical, like incantations or exorcisms. Yet the real spell of these moments needs no magical word — by bringing these Londoners and friends together “to play”, Bye Bye Confidence emits a continuous incandescence, a human warmth rarely felt by the screen. (Călin Boto)