15/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: The French filmmaker talks about her first feature, the challenges of shooting a period film in winter and the unconscious forces of desire

(© Philippe Lebruman)

Unveiled in the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, The Girl in the Snow [+see also:
film review
interview: Louise Hémon
film profile] is the first feature film of French director Louise Hémon.

Cineuropa: The screenplay for The Girl in the Snow is said to have been inspired by the writings of one of your grandmothers. Where exactly did the idea for the film come from?
Louise Hémon: The Hautes-Alpes is an area I know well because my parents live there and I've always been fascinated by its history, both contemporary and ancient. Then, in my imagination, there are stories passed on by various members of my family, particularly on my mother's side, with a generation of secular, atheist teachers who opened schools and went out to teach in small villages in the winter. The first jobs given to young teachers were in schools that no one wanted to go to, schools at the ends of the earth. I was inspired by these stories and the idea for The Girl in the Snow came from two images. The first came from this great-great-aunt's anthropological account for an Alpine geography magazine in 1922. It evokes the moment when the sun finally passes between the mountains and the men who go to bask in the sun at the precise spot where it beats down. And she observes them. So I had this image of a woman watching these men under the warm rays of the sun with the snow glistening all around. The second image comes from a short story written by my grandfather called Beer on the Roof: an old man dies in a village and they can't bury him because the ground is frozen, so they decide to put his coffin on the roof of the school, thinking that it will accompany him through the winter, so that he can hear the children's laughter. And the teacher is terrified!

A first feature set in 1900 in a winter mountain setting, that is quite a challenge!
When you make your first film, you don't want it to cost too much if you want to have the chance to make it. I told myself that it was certainly in the mountains, with snow and difficulties, but that there would only be one set for 1h30, a dozen characters, no extras, always the same costumes, no horse-drawn carriages crossing the streets and no reconstructed town. So the period film barrier didn't seem insurmountable. Secondly, the mountains are an environment that I know well, where I'm comfortable, which was going to be quite beneficial for my imagination and for the direction. It's an evocative, legendary setting, an environment conducive to creation, even if it was cold on the set and difficult to access. It was a bit of an adventure, but it's a happy memory for me and for the team.

How did you go about working on the character of this young republican schoolteacher who discovers a whole environment of popular beliefs and rituals, without lapsing into ethnography?
I come from documentary filmmaking, so I'm used to looking at  the real world. Sometimes, with reality, you find ideas that are crazier and bigger than your own imagination. So I did a lot of research, I read a lot about the history of the Hautes-Alpes. I'm very familiar with the stories of the school teachers who went to spend the winter in the little villages in the high mountains. From that, I created the framework for a more romantic story with my co-writer Anaïs Tellenne. I can also ignore realism when it suits me, because for me, this film is magic realism, both naturalism and fable.

What about the forces of desire, the other major subject of the film? How did you want to portray them?
I started from a simple observation: a film about the emotions, sensual pleasures and sexual desire of a character is easier to shoot in summer when the characters are in swimming costumes by the water, because the sensuality is inherent in the shots. In a winter film, the challenge was to find a way of conveying the desire that circulates when the characters are completely wrapped up and have little access to their skin. So I used all the other elements: the snow, the light, the transparencies through the windows, the whirlwind that blows and stuns, the characters who are cold and therefore all red. But red cheeks also evoke emotion, embarrassment and pleasure. And there's also the link between telluric forces, the forces of nature and this young woman's pleasure. The film's narrative is like an experiment: take a rational, Cartesian character, plunge her into irrational phenomena and see how far her mind will resist. And since she can't control her unconscious side, i.e. her sexuality, it pushes her even further. A character's sexuality is her secret side, her intimacy, and that allowed me to push her to her limits, and the audience with her.

(Translated from French)