Girlhood
Thurs 4 Aug
SynopSiS
Oppressed by her family setting, dead-end school prospects and the boys law in the neighborhood, Marieme starts a new life after meeting a group of 3 free-spirited girls. She changes her name, her dress code, and quits school to be accepted in the gang, hoping that this will be a way to freedom.
The geneSIS – by Director Celine Sciamma
The characters themselves sparked the project. The teenage girls that I would regularly see hanging out in the vicinity of Paris’ Les Halles shopping center, or in the metro, sometimes in Gare du Nord train station: always in a gang, loud, lively, dancing. Wanting to delve deeper, I sought out their blogs and came to be fascinated by their esthetics, styles and poses.
Beyond their irresistible energy, their profiles reflect all the themes that are at the heart of my ongoing work as a filmmaker: the construction of a feminine identity within the framework of social pressure, restrictions and taboos, of which the question of plays on image and identity are central. It was my desire to continue working around the question of youth and initiatory narratives, but in a contemporary corollary, anchored in the political reality of France today.
These unique protagonists carry within them the promise of depicting a realistic portrait as well as the fictional dynamic necessary for narrative tension. Although the story is generational and very much rooted in French society, it also belongs to the realm of cinematic mythology: youth subjected to societal restrictions and taboos. It is a story that is better told in France today by the young women who were brought up in these poor minority areas.
Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian says:
“School’s out for ever at the beginning of this dynamic new film from Céline Sciamma, set in a tough Paris banlieue. It’s not so much a coming-of-age drama, more a protracted and explosively painful identity crisis, riffing on the themes of sexuality and solidarity that Sciamma had explored in previous dramas such as Tomboy (2011) and Water Lilies (2007).”