20/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: French actress Romane Bohringer delivers a personal and generous documentary about women who were abandoned by their own mothers before they became mothers themselves

Romane Bohringer, the well-known and much-loved French actress, presented her second film as a director, Tell Her That I Love Her, in the Special Screenings at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. With this new documentary project, she continues in the autobiographical vein already explored in her first feature film, In The Move For Love [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the story of two parents who are no longer in love but still love each other, and who choose to live on the same floor, with their children as a link.

In Tell Her That I Love Her, Romane Bohringer questions her longing for love and her fear of abandonment, feelings that obsess her and that go back to the departure and death of her mother early in her childhood. But to get there, she starts with the story of another woman. One evening, as she was watching TV, she saw her. Clémentine Autain had come to present her book Tell Her That I Love Her, about which another woman, Christine Angot, had spoken to her. In it, she talks about her mother, who died too soon, an actress whose best role was not that of mother, but whose love she is trying to rediscover. These women speak, and hear one another. Romane knows Clémentine's story. It's the story of a daughter who experiences her mother's fate as a curse, one that she defies every day of her life. It's the story of an absence that generates a feeling of abandonment well into adulthood. The filmmaker's tragedy is that she thinks she has no memories. Thanks to the book and Clémentine's testimony, she's going to rediscover them, much more than she thought.

Here Romane Bohringer is breaking new ground in the field of first-person female documentary filmmaking, a genealogical exploration of family traumas re-acted using the tools of fiction (Little Girl Blue [+see also:
film review
interview: Mona Achache
film profile] and The Mother of All Lies spring to mind, two films that were programmed at Cannes, the second winning the Oeil d'or ex aequo). She combines formats, re-stages her psychologist’s sessions to move the narrative forward, has Clémentine Autain read her script in the studio, and turns her childhood memories into short fictions played out by actresses, before finally taking on the beating heart of her project; the investigation that takes her in the footsteps of her mother, a child sacrificed during decolonisation and the Indochina war, a little girl of mixed blood adopted by abusive French parents and then abandoned, only to be told by the authorities who lost her papers that she doesn't exist. Off the beaten track of documentary and fiction, allowing herself to be sentimental, the filmmaker chooses to open the doors of her intimacy (she who, through her famous ancestry, her father the actor Richard Bohringer, has always lived a form of notoriety) to help others better understand their own story. While the format sometimes leans heavily towards the spectacle, particularly in the reconstructions of childhood memories, it nevertheless demonstrates real generosity, through an approach that is embodied, popular and accessible.

Tell Her That I Love Her was produced by Escazal Films (France). International sales are handled by Kinology.

(Translated from French)