Following an anthology of films by the Dardenne brothers, the Ciné-Rencontres de Prades festival offers a focus on the works of Mia Hansen-Love. The director, who is in the capital Conflent, is thankful that all his films, eight in total, have been programmed, including “Un beau matin” in the preview, his latest production, presented at the Cannes festival and to be released only next October. See you.
L’Indépendant: Why did you agree to go to Prades to present your work to film enthusiasts in the region?
Mia Hansen-Love: I’ve been asked questions since last year, but I can’t answer positively because I’m not free. I was very sensitive to the fact that I was invited back the following year. I am always touched when there is a certain loyalty or patience. I had good contact with President Jean-Pierre Abizanda and the way he talked about his festival.
Do you know the place?
No. I’m not from the south. I spent all my childhood summers at the family home in Haute-Loire. For my work I have traveled a lot the world but I know very little about France. Today, I am very excited to discover France. Two weeks ago I was at a festival in La Rochelle, it’s a beautiful town. Since my arrival in Prades I have visited Saint-Michel de Cuixa and I want to go to Serrabone. I am more sensitive to these spiritual places when they are in a state like this, i.e. in the middle of nature.
Do you appreciate that the festival programs all of your films?
This has happened before and a few times, but this is the first time in France. So I was so excited and I gave it a lot of importance, especially since my first film, in a way, I was thinking about a job. It sounds like it’s pretending, I hope not. I’ve always been interested in the consistency of what I do. I’ve always wanted the meaning of my work to come not only from the films being taken separately, but from the way they respond to each other. I want my films to have a dialogue between them, an organic link. So I was very lucky that eight films were filmed and not separated.
Melvin Poupaud and Léa Seydoux star in Un beau matin, premiered Saturday night at the Lido de Prades.
Saturday night, at the end of the festival, you will present your latest production, “Un beau matin”. What does this film represent in your career?
After realizing Bergman Island is an island that took place in a lot of Swedish nature, a romantic film in open spaces and that escaped a kind of realism, when I started writing Good morning I felt like I was going home after escaping Sweden. I went home in the sense that it was an autobiographical film. It’s about the relationship between a father and his daughter. A sick father with neurodegenerative disease. What’s more, it’s a film shot in Paris in settings very close to me, in my daily life, which probably brings me back to the reality that I want to escape from Sweden. There, on the contrary, I wanted to face it.
What are your plans after the festival?
Join me on the release ofGood morning. Before it was released on October 5 in France, I was in the USA, especially in Los Angeles then in competition at the Toronto festival in Canada. Then I will go on to write a somewhat atypical mini-series project on the six stages of the life of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a journalist, traveler, writer, Swiss German, who died in 1942. Her journey, her story, the his work has bothered me for a long time. I realized a few years ago that it didn’t fit the format of a film in terms of length, which led me to make it into six consecutive episodes. I started working on it, but it was a long project with a lot of historical research. I had just started writing the first episode, so I would never go back to the cinema.