Caroline Deruas Peano unveiled her second feature film, Stereo Girls [+lee también:
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Cineuropa: Why was the subject of friendship between two 17-year-old girls so important to you?
Caroline Deruas Peano: Because I experienced it and it had a huge impact on my story and my life. I lost a close friend from my teenage years when we were 17. This event and this friendship left a deep mark on me. I always knew that one day I would pay tribute to this friend, to this friendship, and that I would talk about the extremely traumatic experience of losing someone so close at such a young age. But for a long time, I couldn't do it because I was too weighed down by the sadness of her passing and I couldn't find the enthusiasm and joy that we had when we were teenagers. But I found that joy again by watching my daughter grow up and seeing her develop her own friendships. That's what inspired me to start writing the film.

While dealing with this subject matter, the film manages to transcend its dramatic nature by being very intense, pop and dreamlike. How did you achieve this?
I wanted the film to remain a tribute to friendship, to tell the story of a great friendship and to place friendship above love. I wanted it to remain light-hearted, but at the same time for the audience to feel the violence of the shock of a senseless death. So I immediately thought of the film in two parts: first, we are fully with them, then the death occurs, like a guillotine in the middle of the film. The original, French title of the film is Les Immortelles (lit. “The Immortals”) because it is the story of a friendship from childhood to beyond death, a friendship that would survive death, even if it is obviously more complicated than that. It was necessary to convey hope despite the violence of the drama and to talk about death by including it in life, which is problematic in our societies. Our dream world, our dreams, and cinema are places where our dead still find their place. We needed to push the boundaries of our culture a little, as is done in Mexico, for example, so that our dead are always with us. Dreams are very important to me, I pay close attention to them, as I do to the surreal world. That's what has always protected me from tragedy. I've taken refuge in them throughout my life and I wanted to convey that in film.

How far did you want to push the visual and narrative boldness?
The was already a bit of that in Daydreams [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Caroline Deruas
ficha de la película]. Trying to integrate our dreams and our imagination into our daily lives is something that already occupies me in real life, as if everyday life weren't interesting enough and we always had to add another dimension to it, a poetic one. I seek to break down the boundaries between reality and our dream world. So I really wanted to push that in the film, so that we could get a little lost in it, but at the same time life would go on. And that these dreams also play a role in our lives, helping us to move forward, until they become almost as important as reality.

As for the pop aspect, I translated the desire for cinema that we had at the time with this teenage friend into a desire for music. We had an extremely naive view of art, the view of young provincial girls, and I wanted to convey that very intense side of projection, of the absolute dream of making music and moving to Paris. I didn't want to have a bird's-eye view of adolescence, but to dive right into it with all its fantasies.

You didn't hold back: slow motion, split screen, etc.
Firstly, I really like the conventions of teen movies. Secondly, it took me eight years to make this film, so once I was in it, I wanted it to be a space where anything goes. There are many financiers, which is an economic reality in cinema today, who don't support this kind of freedom. It's almost a miracle that we managed to make this film, but as a result, I was completely free. It's important that fiction films remain a space where we can continue to explore and experiment. It's a battle, a risky gamble.

There is also a mixture of very prosaic teenage themes (school, romantic interests, relationships with parents) and philosophical references (Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza).
That's what adolescence is all about: you may have a crude sense of humour, but at the same time there is a rare, powerful depth, almost dangerous because you are so sensitive that everything takes on an incredible, exaggerated dimension.