04/09/2011

There to present Almayer’s Folly [+see also:
trailer
film profile] out of competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, Chantal Akerman received special thanks from festival director Marco Müller, who praised her work, regretting that the Belgian director didn’t agree to try for the honours of the Golden Lion or show her film in competition.

Akerman has adapted Joseph Conrad’s first novel, noticeably moving away from the original material. It is still about Captain Almayer and his daughter Nina who live somewhere in Malaysia, far away from everything, on the banks of a large choppy river. The father loves his daughter who was born to a native woman who went mad, but Nina doesn’t feel any love in return. Placed in a boarding school with the aim of educating her to make a white girl out of her, Nina remains unmoved by the words of her father. She is attracted by her own, by Dain, a rebel sought by the authorities who has promised to help Almayer to find the gold mine he’s always been looking for...

“Stay with me. We’ll go to Europe. I’ll find you a man and we’ll all live together.” This line from the novel for a long time left its mark on the director who took it as the starting point to develop her film, a (majority) co-production between France and Belgium which benefited from the federal mechanism of the Tax Shelter.

In order to submit the screenplay in Belgium, Akerman had to hire a Belgian actress and young Aurora Marion, for whom this is her debut film, was chosen for the lead role of Nina. Once again, one line was decisive for the director: “I’m not a white girl”.

Almayer’s Folly deals above all with the issue of ethnicity and attachment to one’s people in an unconscious struggle against forced uprooting. To harmonise with the slow pace and solemn, almost theatrical tone of her film, Akerman needed a cinematography free from the coldness of HD images and she opted for a shoot in Super 16. The emulsion of the film adds the dirty and damp beauty which the film needed in order to make the setting — that jungle, that river, that hole in which Almayer awaits death — a character in its own right and decisive in this story of love, waiting and death in the soul.

(Translated from French)