Perla [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Alexandra Makarová
fiche film], Austrian director Alexandra Makarová’s portrait of a woman and mother, has been presented at this year's IFFR, in the Tiger Competition. Perla is also the name of her protagonist, whom the audience follows closely in her struggles. We spoke to the director about her inspiration and how her own background influenced the script.

Cineuropa: Why did you want to tell this story?
Alexandra Makarová: One inspiration was the fact that fleeing a country has been part of my family history. I come from a family of Russian refugees to Czechoslovakia, so this has always been a big topic for me. My great-grandfather was sent to a Gulag after World War II, for ten years. He was only released after Stalin's death. That had a big impact on my grandmother and her sister, who were relocated and lived in awful conditions in a monastery, before leaving the country. During my childhood, I was told a lot of stories about it. I guess I still have the urge to understand how a family can cope with really traumatic situations like these – and, more specifically, from the perspective of women. I'm so interested in women's stories since they usually have many more obstacles to face than men. It was important for me to tell the story of a mother and a daughter who don’t necessarily have a conventional relationship.

Why did you choose to make Perla a painter?
As I said, a lot of inspiration came from my family. My mother is a painter, and my grandfather was one, too. I wanted Perla to be an artist, and compared to musicians, for example, painters are more lonely and somehow more complicated characters.

Motherhood is one of your main topics. What kind of relationship did you want to depict between Perla and her daughter?
A complicated one. When I began writing, my daughter was one year old. My point of view on motherhood changed a lot at that time. I wanted to capture a mum who sees herself as a mother and feels as if having her child should be enough to make her happy. But she has her own needs and wishes for her own future, too. So, Perla might not live up to this [traditional] idea of motherhood – she might not be considered a good mother, which is totally stupid. But we have been living in that culture since the virgin Mary. It might be difficult to have sympathy for Perla because people grow up with this mother figure that’s always caring and loving. But I know so many women who are different. For sure, Julia, her daughter, doesn't have the easiest of childhoods, but I think the most important thing, as cheesy as it sounds, is for a child to feel loved. Feeling unconditional love from your parents as a child makes you more resilient and stronger in adulthood. The film is really about a woman's resilience.

At one point, Perla tells Josef that he can't understand her reaction because he doesn't know about the “Slavic soul”. What is he missing?
On one hand, it was a way to say that he is a foreigner in her country and doesn't understand everything – that could have been the same for any country combination. But then, of course, the Slavic soul is something I would describe as very emotional, and I would say it has a very irrational side. I don't want to tar everyone with the same brush, of course, but in my experience, people from Slavic countries are harsher sometimes: they will talk less about their suffering and seem less empathetic about yours.

You shot a lot of interior scenes, in both Vienna and Kosice. Was it difficult to recreate this specific period through the production design?
In Slovakia, it was really difficult. I didn't think it would be, because when I went the last few times to visit family in a village near the Ukrainian border, that village really hadn’t changed in the last 30 years. So, I was convinced that we could shoot there. But then, during COVID-19, everyone began renovating. It was therefore difficult to find a village in Slovakia that ticked all the boxes because, for example, the windows were all new. We finally found a village, not that far from Vienna, that was almost completely empty. Most of the houses had been abandoned for 20 years. In most of the buildings, there were still personal objects from the previous owners, like furniture and photographs. It was kind of sad, and a very peculiar feeling.

How did you find the actress who plays Perla?
It was a long search process because I never had a precise idea of what she should look like. I just knew how she had to be on the inside. We did the casting in Slovakia and found Rebeka Poláková. It was a challenge because she doesn't speak German. So, she had to learn her lines completely phonetically, which was a constraint because we couldn't improvise too much.