Hilum is a strikingly beautiful and quite spooky fantasy created by marionette designer and manipulator Patrick Sims of Les Antliaclastes puppet theater.

The manipulators dressed and masked in white lace become a part of the surreal world of Hilum as they interact with the puppets in an opium-like dream. In medical terminology hilum is the point where blood vessels and nerves enter and begin to vein their way through an organ, not unlike an umbilical cord or a puppet’s strings, carrying energy and primal instruction - magic embodied.

Hilum takes place in the basement laundry room of a second-rate Natural History Museum. The cellarage is populated by a host of dubiously adorable urchins who have, for some reason or other, been cut off from the rest of the kingdom of curiosities that has remained ordered upstairs. Orphaned and liberated from their hosts, the prenatal rascals amuse themselves as most children would do at this age. Washer-women attend to their opus of bleaching laundry, despite the frequent shenanigans of the children.What starts off as mere women’s work and child’s play eventually becomes impossible. In the cubic crucible- whites mix with colours, wools are washed with warm water, the cat is chucked into the heavy duty rinse… and playtime quickly becomes a downright theatre of cruelty.

Video directed and filmed by Sébastien Jousse, Franck Littot and Benoit Millot.