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“Petite Maman” at the Berlinale: Director Sciamma: “It’s a dance with the spirits” – culture

The French director and author Céline Sciamma, born in 1978, has been one of the most important female voices in European auteur cinema since her historical love drama “Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames”, for which she received the script award in Cannes in 2019. Before that she shot “Water Lillies” (2007) and “Tomboy” (2011), among others. Her film “Petite Maman” about the fairytale encounter between an eight-year-old and her own mother as a child is one of the most beautiful films in the competition, but the jury didn’t get it. The conversation with Celine Sciamma took place over the phone.

Ms. Sciamma, “Petite Maman” is about eight-year-old Nelly who begins to understand her mother’s sadness when she befriends her eight-year-old self. Where did this idea come from?

In the beginning there was only the picture of two girls building a tree house. I then started writing after the initial lockdown because I felt that in this situation it was the right story to talk about our dealings with children and our collective grief.

Is that why the film starts in a nursing home? Nelly’s grandmother has died, the girl says goodbye.

I had the scene before the lockdown. When the pandemic started, this farewell scene took on a new meaning for me, it changed from an individual to a collective experience. In France, many old people died alone in homes. I knew then that I had to make the film.

Nelly loses her grandmother and at the same time becomes friends with her mother Marion. What do children see in these caregivers that adults may not see?

I’m less interested in a classic mother-daughter duality. I wanted to take this common notion further. Grandmothers play an important role in a child’s life, especially with girls. They are just as much a caregiver as the mother. For the child’s understanding of the concept of death, the grandmother is even the key. That’s why I wanted to portray them as a trio. This covenant best reflects our childhood experience: the feeling of security, how we grow up, how we love. I wanted to create a new mythology for the screen, for me there is something therapeutic about it.

Mother and daughter, of the same age, in the movie fairy tale “Petite Maman”.Photo: Lilies Film

How therapeutic?

It opens up playful possibilities for a dialogue about the fiction of family, which is basically always based on rivalry. But what if we find a new level in our relationships with loved ones, a safe place where we can easily meet them as individuals? As a best friend, for example. You can play with it in the cinema, and maybe it will open a window – in your imagination or even in your heart. All you have to do then is climb into it.

Nelly and Marion learn to deal with reality by playing together. Can you imagine the shooting in a similar way?

Approximately. All of my personal relationships with people are about creating something with them. The shooting took place in a forest near the place where I was born, where I built tree houses myself as a child. When we got there, the trees were still green, so we had to bring in leaves from the surrounding forests. A handful of adults then stood there and distributed leaves over the forest floor like small children so that the scenery looks autumnal. Strange experience. We shot in the middle of a pandemic, but at the same time we weren’t allowed to take the gravity of the time too much to heart


Can you describe your work with the twins Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz? The scenes of Nelly and Marion look completely carefree.

The question of what exactly a picture consists of and how much passion you put into it must be taken seriously. I talked to them a lot to find their rhythm. When they play together, they follow a script, we’ve never left them alone. It’s easy for children to get bored, so filming has to be quick; after all, we only had three hours a day with them. An example: We never talked about feelings, it was always a game with the cinema between us. For example, when Joséphine enters the grandmother’s house alone, I told her beforehand to imagine a scene from a creepy film. Children understand intuitively. In the end, you have to accept what they give you.

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The girls meet, so to speak, in the present, past and future.

For me, that’s the idea of ​​pure cinema. Time plays a crucial role in the film. The audience can also take the time to linger with the girls while playing and getting to know each other. I wanted to harmonize seeing and experiencing. The audience should get the space to discover their own story. I would have liked to have played more with the motif of time travel. But that would have dissolved the present. But I wanted a time machine that gave us a presence.

Celine Sciamma’s period film “Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames”.Photo: Alamode

Have you watched “Back to the Future” again? I kept thinking about time travel paradoxes – like when Nelly meets the younger version of her grandmother.

I have hardly seen a film as often as “Back to the Future”. I love him. However, it is also emblematic of the Hollywood cinema of the eighties. It’s always about the logic of capital – and the question of how to return to my bourgeois world. I find it fascinating what circulates in time travel films. My inspiration, however, was “Big” by Penny Marshall; he is much closer to “Petite Maman”. Marshall treated the subject of time travel for the first time with a female gaze: your film is not about money, but about love.

Once Nelly’s father moved the refrigerator in the grandmother’s house, behind which the old wallpaper came to light. A beautiful picture about memory.

For me, remembering doesn’t just mean going to the past. It can also mean creating new memories. When I step on my time machine today, I have the healing memory of my grandmother, with whom I played in Cairo in 1933. Healing is not only based on knowledge, fantasies also have a healing effect. By imagining relationships with people who are no longer with us. It’s like dancing with the ghosts.
“Petite Maman” does not have a German start date yet.

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