“Manon de Boer’s minimalist cinema is at its most radical in her latest work On a Warm Day in July. Like a number of her films made over the past ten years, it features a performance – American Soprano Claron McFadden improvises on a seventeenth-century song in the empty ground floor of a Brussels townhouse. In previous works, such as one, two, many (2012), Dissonant (2010), or Presto, Perfect Sound (2006), the performer is at the center of the film’s concept, and at the center of the camera’s attention, but in On a Warm Day in July the camera quickly abandons the singer and goes on to wander and explore her surroundings. Void of objects, the space is filled with history, each crack on the wall or scrap of detaching wallpaper a mesmerizing cinematic presence. As in many of her films, de Boer uses the form of the long take – which, working with 16mm, she has described as a performance in itself. We hear the singer’s voice and the transition from singing to breathing to singing again, a voice as matter occupying and thereby embodying space.” (María Palacios Cruz)