Interview with Anna-Marija Adomaitytė & Elie Grappe, I Think you Should be Here director

What is left of TikTok and its constant self-staging? After the endless flow of content comes the relentless dance of bodies. With sensitivity, Ellie Grappe and Anna-Maria Adomaitytè film seven young TikTok users in the intimacy of their bedroom. In a “room of their own” open to the world, they reclaim their voices and bodies through a hypnotic dance. 

Interview with Anna-Marija Adomaitytė and Elie Grappe

What was your starting point? 

Anna-Marija Adomaitytė: The film follows a long-term choreographic work for theatres called TikTok-Ready Choreographies that I conducted since 2023 with the seven protagonists. As they grew older, we wanted with the movie to capture this specific period of their lives and to ask what does it mean today to be at the end of an adolescence shaped by social media and what can be done with all the vocabulary and all those gestures accumulated throughout time.

Ellie Grappe: Pursuing Anna-Marija’s work as a choreographer, we invited these users to draw on the full vocabulary of TikTok that they know so well and that has been part of their lives until now. We realized that what they did with it revealed both the violence of this experience, but also a genuine desire for interaction and a strange, latent collective power. We devised the film with the protagonists all the way through to the editing process with Suzana Pedro, as a sort of song and dance ritual leading into adulthood, where we question what will remain of one’s vocabulary as a teenager. 

You are a director and a choreographer; how did you divide the work on the film? 

Anna-Marija Adomaitytė: Actually, we did everything quite together : for us, it was important to give a lot of agency to the girls and install a collective process. The work was shaped through moments of choir that were guided by performer and singer Jeanne Pâris, throughout sessions of improvisation. We proposed the girls to remember their TikTok dances and work with their body memory. Gautier Teuscher composed the music using sounds from numerous TikTok videos collected by them. 

Elie Grappe: This was my first time co-directing, and we have been collaborating in one way or another across all our projects. Anna-Marija was present throughout most of the making of Olga, and I followed the creative process for her performance. We know each other’s work very well and we share common concerns; around the exhaustion of gesture and the capacity of bodies to erode the systems of power they are part of.   

What do these young women represent to you? 

Anna-Marija Adomaitytė: Their strength and the complexity of their experience was something that touched us the most. We wanted to compose the film together with their embodied point of view as active TikTok users, to portray a very ambivalent experience that they live with the phenomena of social media.

Ellie Grappe : What struck us when they spoke about their experience of social media, was how sharp, intelligent, and funny they were… We learnt a great deal from these clear-headed, strong people who are slowly entering adulthood and shaping their own political take on the world. Although what they are saying is harsh, they give us hope!