Speaking of the most popular female directors in the past few years, Céline Sciamma must be included on the list. So far, the French director has scripted and directed five feature films, and wrote the screenplays for many other films.

The 11th BJIFF Beijing Film Panorama will focus on Céline Sciamma, and screen three films written and directed by her as well as other works she has participated in screenwriting, including Petite Maman, a new film that shined at major international film festivals and exhibitions this year and was shortlisted in the Competition Section of the Berlin International Film Festival, and Tomboy, a film that won the Teddy Jury Award of the Berlin International Film Festival ten years ago. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (4K) and My Life as a Courgette are both darlings of international film festivals and have enjoyed much popularity.

 

Sciamma mentioned in an article he wrote for Sight and Sound film magazine that she felt a strong movie atmosphere at home since childhood, when her grandmother took her to watch various musicals, American comedies and classical Hollywood movies. “When I was 13 years old, my life planning was to earn money for movie tickets.”

 

She also wrote that there was an art cinema named Utopia at the place where she grew up, and she came up with an idea of directing her own films after watching the film Three Colors: Blue directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

 

In 2001, Sciamma studied at La Fémis, a national vocational image and sound institution of higher learning in France, and became an alumna of masters such as Jean Renoir, Theo Angelopoulos and Louis Malle. She wrote her first original screenplay Water Lilies as her graduation work. More than a year later, she brought the story to the big screen. Water Lilies tells the story of three adolescent girls who practice synchronized swimming with girlish worries, becoming a blockbuster at international film festivals. 

 

With this debut work, Sciamma has broken the public impression of teenager-themed movies in the past. Exploring the adolescent world and self-perception are also two major themes of her follow-up works. In addition to these two themes, there is of course her constant female perspective.

 

In Tomboy (2011), we can see the gentle gaze cast by Céline Sciamma on the heroine Laura who is struggling to find her identity. The film shows a rare aspect in youth growth films - those subtle moments that linger on the edge of adolescence, as well as the predicaments and temptations interspersed with them. 

 

In her third feature film Girlhood, Sciamma began to explore the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The film continues the themes of desire and breaking social discipline in the previous two works. While showing the self-liberation of African-American girls, it also reveals to the audience the social pressures that restrain them. Sciamma once said in an interview that Girlhood is her last youth growth film. This film, along with Water Lilies and Tomboy, has become her “trilogy of growing-up years”.

 

After Girlhood, Céline Sciamma continued to work with other directors to write screenplays, among which the most special one was the stop-motion animation My Life as a Courgette. This film, adapted from the novel Autobiography of a Zucchini by French writer Gilles Paris, was scripted by Sciamma and Director Claude Barras. The story is also about the loss of childhood and the onset of adolescence, as well as the choices that accompanying growth. 

 

When re-directing films after five years, Sciamma specially placed the background of Portrait of a Lady on Fire in a castle in the 18th century. Through the mutual gaze and ambiguous interaction between the painter and the model, it broke the tradition of "male gaze" and gave this female story more tension. 

 

Professor Dai Jinhua commented the film like this: 

 

"The convention that usually interprets women as a passive victim of tragedy is completely erased here, and replaced with an active and dominant choice of fate and a frank commitment to tragedy."

 

 

"Always I was asked this question: 'What is it like to be a female filmmaker?’ I would rather people ask me what it is like to be a filmmaker.”

 

Indeed, Sciamma's films are more than just thinking about women. Through her prominent display of women, she observes and thinks about the rigid ways people face gender issues today, thereby encouraging the audience to start anew to look for and define a new perspective.