Title: Pleasure Struggle

Director: Thibault-Théodore

Country: France

Year: 2026

Running time: 18′

Genre/Subgenre: Fiction, Drama, Queer, LGBTQ, Youth, World, Universe, Independent Cinema,

Writer: Thibault-Théodore

DOP in Japan: Gwendal Peron

DOP in France: Marvin Gombart

Edition: Alexandre Sellem

Original Soundtrack: Casey MQ

Sound Recordists: Steve Lefever, Masanari Sasaki, Mathieu Orban
Sound Mix: Jony Guedj, Nicolas Aleksandrov

Hair & Makeup: Nori (Tokyo, grooming Japan), Mantis Leprêtre  ( Mua on Rose McGowan )

Poster design: Sebastián Chicchón, Victoire Gazzola (Japanese logo)

Synopsis:

Indie-queer techno-fable: Aran lives alone in Shinjuku, in a reality where people struggle to dream. Sleepless and wired, he is haunted by a sound only he can hear. By night, he tests a machine he built himself — a fragile device that captures dreams through sound, decoding hidden frequencies where memory and brain waves blur.

Director’s biography:

Thibault-Théodore is a filmmaker based in the Basque Country.

Raised queer in a place that offered no clear shape for him, he learned early to invent the worlds he could not find around him. Stories became a way to survive.

He left school young. At seventeen, he moved through Asia, supporting himself through sex work while drifting between countries, languages, and borrowed lives. Living on the margins exposed him to forms of intimacy, loneliness, and performance that would later become central to his cinema. Photography came first, almost by accident. Film followed. There was no formal training and no predetermined path.

His work occupies the porous boundary between autobiography and fiction. He often keeps his actors’ real names while reinventing everything around them, creating films that feel both documentary and dream. Drawing from experiences that cannot be researched from a distance, his stories explore exile, desire, addiction, chosen families, and the persistent search for belonging.

At the center of his films is often the same figure: a wounded child trapped inside an adult body, searching for a way home. Through ancestral medicine, chemical escape, obsession, love, and altered states, his characters navigate worlds where memory and imagination become impossible to separate.

He makes films about people trying to invent themselves before the world decides who they are