BLOODHOUND

A woman wakes up with the urge to film blood.
In Paris, her city, she meets a blood courier, a blood transplant specialist, a chimera… And she remembers a trial she followed a long time ago. The contaminated blood trial.
Meanwhile, deep in a forest, a dog leads its search for blood.

When she was a legal reporter, aged 28, Yamina Zoutat received an instruction: never show blood. Twenty years later, Bloodhound disobeys this masculine command given at the time of the contaminated-blood trial. Starting with her instinctive desire for bloody images, like the hunting dog that gives the film its title, the filmmaker advances through a series of bifurcations, taking her camera to places that are revealed in fits and starts. The blood that left a trail of death leads her to the blood that saves lives: the one transported by Mohamed, grafted by Stéphanie, received by Isabelle. When someone is grafted with hematopoietic stem cells, the DNA in their blood becomes that of the donor. But this substance that runs through our veins, was it ever our own? An ambiguous red thread, this shared liquid tissue launches us on the trail of a story of heredity and mixing in which Mohamed’s daughter, Stéphanie’s father and Isabelle’s donor all intervene. The intimacy and story of the narrator, whose voice punctuates the film, repeatedly emerge in the narrative but then immediately veer off onto the periphery, because the network woven between the protagonists is continually expanding. The chimera, a mythical creature that lends its name to those who carry grafted blood in their veins, previously symbolised the ages of a woman’s life, and it was said of the those who had stopped menstruating that they could no longer “see”. So the full circle is drawn: it is the whole of humanity that speaks in Bloodhound, from the point of view of a woman determined to journey on freely.  

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian