Marthe Peters lives with Henry, “her” cat, to whom she writes a letter, recognising a shared desire to slow down, sleep, and withdraw from the loudness of the world and the complexity of the contemporary. Sleep, the cats’ way of switching off, ceases to be laziness or escape and becomes a space of intimacy, care and protection, a choice that can also be political. Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep is a love declaration and an increasingly common desire to retreat into one’s shell, which, in Venetian dialect, might be rendered as «L’è mèjo dormir sforsè che laorar de gusto» (It’s better to sleep forced than to work with pleasure).

Marthe Peters is a Belgian filmmaker. Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep and her debut short film Baldilocks were both selected at Berlinale Shorts.