19/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: The French filmmaker deciphers his fascinating portrait of a woman and a group of friends caught up in the whirlwind of the Corsican nationalist movement

Released during the Directors' Fortnight at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, In His Own Image [+see also:
film review
interview: Thierry de Peretti
film profile] is the 4th feature film of French filmmaker Thierry de Peretti.

Cineuropa : You had already tackled the subject of Corsican nationalism in A Violent Life [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. Why did you return to the subject with In His Own Image?
Thierry de Peretti : For a start, I like stories that don't end: you go deeper and the films are better for it. But it was reading Jérôme Ferrari's novel and it really struck me. First of all, I wanted to work on his writing because he is my contemporary and Corsica is also a centre for him, one of the subjects around which he revolves. Secondly, the novel had a lot in common with A Violent Life, particularly the period. Last but not least, the character of Antonia was one I'd been waiting for, the exact female counterpoint to the one in A Violent Life. What's more, the period covered by the novel and the film corresponds to the period I remember as a child, teenager and young man, i.e. the 80s and 90s. And I like to ask myself (which involves questions of direction), what do I remember about that: what scared me? What excited me? What was I thinking at the time? What did I feel? And what do I think today? All this fascinates me because it questions me: it updates my representations of those times and therefore of today. I wouldn't look at the conflicts in the same way if I weren't Corsican and if I hadn't lived through the political events of those years, events that were both tragic and also the story of a very strong struggle for emancipation. Corsica allows me to look at my contemporaries and my era because the film, even if it evokes the 80s and 90s, is a film of 2023 with young people of 2023. What interested me was writing a dialogue (with my co-writer Jeanne Aptekman) with the novel and with Jérôme Ferrari's thoughts on issues of representation, image and the politics of Corsica.

How did you manage the pace of the film, whose plot spans almost 20 years, with your style that favours sequence shots?
In the novel, it takes place over 30 years. Here, it's a bit more compressed. It's paradoxical because this isn't a film about the passage of time, but I've made sure that you can feel it in the bodies and eyes of the actors and actresses, as we see them pass through and be struck by events. It's true that for me, who works a lot with sequence shots so that the viewer is connected to the present, to the same temporality as the characters, this creates friction. With the sequence shot, we're almost in real time, but from one scene to the next, we can make leaps in time and leaps in the psyche of the character Antonia, who we find in completely different states and situations.

You also mix a lot of visual sources: the film itself, Antonia's photographs, television archive footage, and so on. Why do you do this?
This is part of the novel's reflection on the image: the question of representations. Changes in image format are often linked to historical moments. I wondered whether I should use archive footage. Have them narrated by the narrator's voice-over? Reconstruct them? On film? By photography? The film does not settle the issue once and for all. I like using different sources and materials. It's a fiction film that's going to be released in cinemas, so you can't go too experimental, but I'd like to do that a bit more. So it's a way of being experimental without it being too dry or too off-putting for viewers who aren't familiar with the experimental, but also a way of raising awareness: there's an interesting plastic profusion, right down to the still images, because there are even sequences that were shot in still photos. The novel is popular, generous and very direct: if you're very familiar with the political history of Corsica, you're in, but if you don't know anything about it, it doesn't matter. It's an object that moves according to who's looking at it, and for me that's a very important idea for cinema.

(Translated from French by Margaux Comte)