19/06/2003 - The French director has just turned 29 but has already been awarded with the Caméra d'Or at Cannes for her first film. And she’s now started working on a new production

The Caméra d'Or she won at last year’s Cannes Film Festival hasn’t helped her very much. Julie Lopez Curval, the author of the French film Seaside, out on release in Italy from today, already has considerable experience as a screenwriter, which can be seen by the great care with which she treats the many characters who make up the “movement of life”.
Seaside is distributed for TeodoraFilm by Vieri Razzini, and by now, it’s part of the young director’s past: the future holds a project that is still uncertain, from a production point of view, and she prefers not to talk about it too much, apart from saying that it’s a romantic comedy, which will probably feature the same cast as her successful debut feature length film.

Where did you get the idea to set your film in a small seaside village?
"I started off from the story, which was about the interaction between three families in a static place, and their inner changes, all set to the background of a place far away from the world. When I visited the village in the film, Cayeux Sur Mer, in the Bay of Somme, it seemed to me to be the ideal place, both rough and sweet at the same time.
I’d written a lot of dialogue, then I selected my pieces based on the influence of the lunar-like setting, almost fixed in time, which poses many existential questions".

Why did you chose to use a luminous photography, in such contrast to such a barren and deserted place?
"I wanted a very simple representation. The sea had to have a particular role, keeping the people there, yet pushing them to leave, and so I thought about a pictorial style of photography. The precision with which the camera watches the passing of time transforms the vision into a small reality, and a general reflection about society".

And why did you use a gravel factory as the thematic emblem of the film?
"The factory is a place of repetition. I liked the idea of a world that is disappearing, and from this point of view I was really affected by Human Resources by Cantet. It’s an eternal cycle: they gather up the stones, they choose the ones they want, and then they throw the others back in the sea. Maybe, one day, they’ll be collected up again …"