Lunch withAmour(s)
Interview with Mathilde Chavanne, director of Amour(s)
Can you tell us about the origin of Amour(s), a sensitive but also humorous documentary that questions young children about how they relate to feelings of love?
Amour(s) is more of a docu-fiction than a documentary. Two starting points led me to this film: the first is the Création en cours program offered by the Ateliers Médicis, which invites artists from all backgrounds in residence in primary schools, in rural areas. It was the opportunity to make a film in more hectic and faster times than what is imposed by fiction. It met the need for action that I felt at the time. When I discovered the call for proposals, I had a month to apply. I tried to look at what was on my mind at the time: my love situation. I decided to make it the gateway for the project. I had already worked a lot with children and I knew that we could work together to open wide the possibilities. I wanted to make a film that challenged the viewer with regards to the presumed innocence of children. I arrived at the school and I did interviews with them on the first day. It was through these interviews that I met them, and the rest came empirically, over the course of the residence.
How did you work with the children for the staged sequences? More generally, how did they react to this experience?
The residency took place between January and June. When I started having children write scenes of encounters and break-ups in February, I didn’t know that in the meantime we would get the support of the Normandy region, and that we could shoot them in a real fiction framework, with a team and sets. When we received this grant, everything took a more ambitious turn. It was exciting for me, and for the teaching staff. The children also understood that things were becoming more important. The scripts they were writing (inside which I added some monologues…) were going to become fictional cinema. With regard to their reaction to the experiment, it seems to me that the film already reveals a lot of the residence’s features. It’s good to keep a little mystery. What is certain is that these children live in Rânes, a very small village in Normandy, and that they were very excited about the idea that we were making movies. The creation of sets in the school and then the shooting were superb experiences for both them and the film team. As someone who grew up in the country, I identified very much with them and their enthusiasm, and I think it was the film I had the greatest joy in shooting.
Amour(s) juxtaposes interviews, purely documentary sequences, and other stagings: how did you develop this system?
It imposed itself naturally. There were indeed these three different components, and I had the intuition in the beginning that they would find a way to come together during editing. Actually, it wasn’t that simple, and it took me a while to find the movie. I didn’t want to make a linear or didactic film, and I didn’t want to make a film that was too experimental and would keep the viewer at a distance. In fact, I wanted to do a docu-fiction, and that word, which is a label, helped me keep the movie on track. I knew my subject, I knew that I had shot some funny things, as well as some moving things. It mattered to me that all this was put together in a somewhat astonishing form, which at the end of the day was the only possible way for it to be. I also knew that Ange Halliwell’s music would help bind things together. By putting these elements up against each other, I ended up finding combinations that seemed obvious to me, I got closer to what I wanted and could do, and the film was born.
Did making this documentary allow you to discover a different way of looking at love?
I don’t think so… It allowed me to meet beautiful children, whom I wish I could film again in the future, and it allowed me, of course, to see again how permeable and imbued children are with the adult world around them. As for love, they knew a lot more than I probably did! Perhaps it is the children rather than the way of looking at love that one discovers differently through the film?
What are your reference works?
For this project, I didn’t have any films in mind. I was thinking about the work of Rineke Dijsktra, who is a Dutch photographer and videographer whose work fascinates me. She has notably produced a video installation, I Can See a Woman Crying, in which are filmed ten English schoolchildren. They are facing the painting The Weeping Woman by Picasso, who never appears on the screen and is quoted only at the end of the video. The children wonder among themselves about what they see in the picture. They see a woman crying. At first, they wonder why she is crying and then, one by one, empathize for her, and think about how to stop her crying… It is a work that tells of the children’s ability to project themselves into bodies that are not their own, to be empathetic. At the same time, they relate the other body to themselves: in their lives, they may have seen people cry, and for what reasons? And how would they have liked to have helped them? All these questions come up in this video, which I wrote about when I was at the Beaux-Arts and which is still in a corner of my mind…
Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
I wanted to create a somewhat surprising form, free to build by building. It’s easy to take the freedom to surprise yourself, to move forward without knowing exactly where you’re going, but it doesn’t attract money. So, in the end, it’s not easy, because money is the lifeblood. Amour(s) is a meagre film, which was created thanks to the desire and energy given by everyone involved, especially the children. The film was created in the unique setting of a school residence; it could not have been done differently. We cannot find funding with a starting point, a vague idea, even if we have in ourselves the intuition that it can lead us far. When you apply for grants for a documentary, you have to present a fairly specific scenario, which is understandable, and at the same time the documentary sometimes encounters the grace of the unpredictable and is diverted from its initial impetus…
