05/07/2024 - The French director talks about her second solo feature film, a vivid and subtle portrait of today’s youth

(© Gabrielle Liefhooghe/BRIFF)

Cineuropa met with French director Claire Burger on the occasion of the screening of her new film, Foreign Language [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Claire Burger
film profile], in International Competition at the 7th Brussels International Film Festival. In competition at the Berlinale, the film paints a vivid and subtle portrait of today’s youth, through the crossed and colliding destinies of two young women, one French and the other German, who will learn to look to the future together.

Cineuropa: What are the origins of the project?
Claire Burger: I wanted to talk about language exchanges, I did a lot of those when I was younger, and I was born on the French-German border, I have a particular relationship with language, with double culture, with travel. In my family, during Covid, a lot of young people were not doing well at all, there was anorexia, suicide attempts, some very violent things. I wanted to find a way to talk about this, to draw the portrait of this youth. But under the pretext of this stay, I also wanted to tell a love story, to talk about Europe, French-German friendship, politics, all while trying to find a way to embody these very theoretical things in emotion.

To embody all this, there are Fanny and Lena. How did you think about what separates them and what brings them together?
I approached it a bit instinctively, but I quickly realised that each character in the film was a bit like me, even if Lena is the character I identify with the most, as a teenager. I was myself very politicised at that age. I also wanted to avoid certain clichés about France and Germany, all while playing with them at times. I didn’t want to oppose a small village in the south of France to a small village in Bavaria. I wanted something more modern, to talk about a Germany I like, which is political, anti-fascist, techno, far from the economic domination and the folkloric.

History and the past have a strong presence in the film, as a weight but also as a horizon of expectation?
Yes, there’s a kind of continuity, each generation has its struggles. No doubt it wasn’t easy to bring down the wall, but now, the climate crisis may be an even taller wall, especially since I have the feeling that we’re not helping the youth to get by very much. There’s something very beautiful in the youth, the hope that we can change things. But the fall of the wall has had an impact on ideologies that we couldn’t have imagined, it opened the way for capitalism and liberalism, which probably is having consequences today. History is in movement, anyway. Today, there are feminist struggles, environmental struggles, we will see how the youth reacts to the rise of the far-right. The film is also about generational divides, even if in the face of today’s challenges, it would be in everyone’s interest to roll up their sleeves.

I was very politicised when I was young, and it was beautiful to think that we could change the world. This belief is possible at that age, and I hope that this generation manages to find hope in this struggle. I wanted to show beautiful things amongst the youth, even if the current moment is complicated.

There is the exaltation of activism, and celebration. There is joy in the struggle.
It was very important to show the celebration. I didn’t want it to be a film about politics, activist, where truths are asserted, but rather that it talks about the fantasy of politics, about how being with others, fighting together, can be almost erotic. Finding a common cause. And in all of that there is celebration, in fact we become one body during protests. For the extras, I went looking amongst the Antifa, the green activists, feminists, LGBTQR+, people from techno music. Today, things are becoming more communitarian, they are rather segmented, and I wanted to create the ideal celebration, the real leftist celebration where there aren’t only white people, not only straight people, not only caricatural leftists. A place where there is pleasure to be together, and to believe that we can change things. I wanted the collective to be desirable, and that we feel the erotic charge that it can have.

(Translated from French)