Liane, 19 years old, daring and fiery, lives with her mother and little sister under the dusty sun of Fréjus in the South of France. Obsessed with beauty and the need to become “someone”, she sees reality TV as her opportunity to be loved. Fate smiles upon her when she auditions for a reality TV show called Miracle Island. When she tells the woman who auditions her that she wants viewers to see “the real me,” we wonder what that would be. So much of her – the prongs of her fake fingernails, her mouth swollen with acid, her unlikely abundance of hair, her grotesquely inflated breasts – is so proudly unreal that a real self is hard to pinpoint.
"I've been watching reality TV for a very long time. I felt the need to question the entertainment that it is supposed to be, but which in fact has nothing light about it /.../. It's a mirror of a society that promotes increasingly extreme values. But when I thought about the candidates' motivations, I realised that for them, most of whom come from working-class backgrounds, it is paradoxically also an alternative to unemployment and a means of gaining access to social status, of ticking the boxes that capitalist society orders us to be in through the values manufactured by money. This ambivalence was very interesting." (Agathe Riedinger)