Country: France
Year: 2023
Duration: 168'
In a Parisian public hospital, Claire Simon questions what it means to live in women’s bodies, filming their diversity, singularity and their beauty in all stages throughout life. Unique stories of desires, fears and struggles unfold, including the one of the filmmaker herself.
Biography
film director
Claire Simon
(London, 1955) grew up in France and began her studies in ethnology. Self-taught, she learned to edit and directed her first short films in the 1970s, before joining the Ateliers Varan, where she became familiar with the realist style of direct cinema. After several short films (La Police, 1988; Scènes de ménage, 1991) and documentaries (Coûte que coûte, 1995; Récréations, 1998), in 1997 she produced her first feature film, Sinon, Oui. During her prolific career, the filmmaker has combined true and fictional stories, as illustrated in Ça brûle (2005). In 2008, her film Les Bureaux de Dieu (2008), a work of realist fiction, received the SACD prize at the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight. In 2016 she wins the Award for Best Documentary at the Venice International Film Festival with Le concours. In 2019, after three years of filming, she has completed Le Village, a documentaries series consisting of 18. In 2022, she came back to fiction with Vous ne désirez que moi, starring Emmanuelle Devos. Notre Corps premiered at Berlinale/Forum in 2023.
FILMOGRAFIA
Madeleine (doc, cm, 1976), Tandis que j’agonise (doc, 1980), La police (cm, 1988), Les patients (doc, 1989), Les patients (doc, 1991), Scènes de menage (mm, 1991), Platytime (doc, 1992), Artiste peintre (doc, 1993), Faits divers (doc, 1995), Coûte que coûte (doc, 1995), Sinon, oui (1997), Récréations (doc, mm, 1999), Ça c’est vraiment toi (doc, 1999), Ça c’est vraiment toi (doc, 2000), 800 Kilomètres de différence (doc, 2002), Mimi (doc, 2002), Ça brûle (2006), Les bureaux de Dieu (doc, 2008), Géographie humaine (doc, 2013), Gare du Nord (2008), Le Bois dont les rêves sont faits (doc, 2015), Le Concours (doc, 2016), Premières solitudes (doc, 2018), Le village (serie tv, doc, 2019) Le fils de l’épicière, le maire, le village et le monde (doc, 2020), Vous ne désirez que moi (2021), Notre corps (doc, 2023).
Declaration
film director
“The initiative of the film came from Kristina Larsen, who is a producer I greatly respect. She told me she’d just spent two years in the hospital, discovering an entire world: the caregivers, from the nurses to the doctors, the patients, and the fact that the unit in which she stayed encompassed everything a woman goes through in her lifetime. I was deeply touched by her proposal, especially as, since I made Les Bureaux de Dieu in 2008 which was about French family planning services, I regretted not having included pregnancy supervision, which these services sometimes cover as well. And yet the pill, abortions, pregnancies, control over one’s body and the wish to have a child all belong to one and the same movement. Very quickly, after just a few days as I spent time in the hospital, a narrative thread became self- evident: the stages of a life’s journey, from youth to death.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, CINEMATOGRAPHY: Claire Simon. EDITING: Luc Forveille. SOUND: Flavia Cordey. PRODUCER: Kristina Larsen. PRODUCTION: Madison Films.
CONTACT: Films Boutique ruta@filmsboutique.com
