A Strange Love Affair with Ego

For as long as she can remember, filmmaker Ester Gould has looked up to her older sister, Rowan, whose impressive creativity and boundless self-confidence only grew with age. Using excerpts of correspondence between the sisters as text on-screen, and self-possessed stand-ins as proxies for her sibling, Gould delves into the nature and nurture of female self-esteem. What is self-assurance anyway? Why apologize for it when you have it, and feel obliged to fake it when you don't? Is there a line separating self-love and narcissism, belief in oneself and delusion, breakthrough and breakdown? Is self-confidence a performance, a compensation, a form of self-expression? All three? An original and vivid hybrid experiment that uses second-person perspective to answer all of these questions and more, A Strange Love Affair With Ego is a tremendous tribute that plays with absence and presence as a way to expand society's categories of confidence and artistic expression. (Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival)