2010 · 12 min · Directed by Philippe Parreno
A portrait of an illegal immigrant Chinese child through the imaginary monsters that incarnate his fears and anxieties. A fiction tacked onto a reality. The reality of the illegal aliens in Manhattan’s Chinatown. People who are called ‘invisible’. This portrait gives an image to someone who doesn’t have one and, at the same time, a real person gains the social identity he’s missing by becoming a fictional character. High definition images make sensible impressions of a city as we cross over to the imaginary. Fantasy and social realism, fiction and documentary overlap. Like Superman or Spiderman, Invisible Boy is a contemporary superhero produced by the city today. His monsters appear slowly, at the beginning as scratches on the film stock, someplace in between the diegesis and the actual world. They are the boy’s superpowers. This is a tale in which a boy’s paranoia produces a topographic vision of a city.
