I am Me

Twins look alike. Sometimes they even think alike. But they’re two rather than one.
I Am Me is in part about the fact that an individual is more than the sum of his or her characteristics. The fact that a person is neither what other people say about them nor their own description of themselves. And photographs and moving images are nothing more than representations.
A person’s true nature, what constitutes the difference between one individual and another, is interchangeable. It doesn’t really differentiate us from others; on the contrary it’s something we have in common: the consciousness of being an individual.
We all have hidden talents. We all secretly believe that we have some great mission in life. As children at least. And in later years we ask, “Is that all there is?”
Everyone’s unique, so we’re told. I doubt that sometimes, because I think that we’re all separate. We’re all individuals. (Kathrin Resetarits)

In I Am Me Kathrin Resetarits explores the meaning of individuality, and her film is set up to resemble a double reflection, with two pairs of female twins, one perhaps six years old, the other ten.
In most scenes the camera captures both sisters in the same picture, showing them singing or playing the recorder. The younger pair chews on bites of bread, the older ones eat yogurt with a spoon?and at first these pictures are juxtaposed almost as if in a structuralist experiment, eating paired with eating, music paired with music, though the synchronicity suggested by the montage of these everyday routines proves to be deceptive, just as the synchronicity within the individual shots.
When Resetarits has ballet students Olga and Anastasia, dressed identically, dance the part of the dying swan near the film’s conclusion, their movements are either correct or clumsy, ambitious or relaxed, obviously demonstrating two individual personalities. And so the film moves away from the hypothesis of duplicates suggested formally in the beginning, and begins to meander more and more, finally ending in darkness with the claim “And that’s me.”
(Maya McKechneay)
Translation: Steve Wilder

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