‘Tell me how you loved me, so I understand how to love.’
 
Following a lengthy casting process that began in 2013, director Adina Pintilie commenced working with a cast of professional and non-professional actors on an artistic research project exploring intimacy. Roving the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not traces the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives.
 
Craving for intimacy, yet also deeply afraid of it, the characters work to overcome old patterns, defence mechanisms and taboos that spring from personal and family histories. Since intimacy involves the body and its boundaries, Touch Me Not inquires deeply into embodied experience and perception to ask how we can find intimacy and love another without losing ourselves.
 
Touch Me Not is Adina Pintilie’s first feature and winner of the Golden Bear award at the Berlinale 2018. The Romanian director’s previous work is characterised by a highly individual visual style, experiments with visual language and exploration of the human psyche. Pintilie, who is also the artistic director and co-founder of Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF), will present her film in person and participate in a Q&A following this screening.

This screening is followed by a Q&A with director Adina Pintilie.

Touch Me Not screens in the ICA Cinema from 19 October.

On 24 October, Open Debate: Touch Me Not – The Politics of Intimacy is an audience discussion with the film’s protagonists.