“We Must Film in Favor”
Mia Hansen-Løve, as we keep saying, has been present since the very beginnings of the festival. In 2011, the D’A – Barcelona Film Festival hosted Le Père de mes enfants. Proud of the work carried out over the years, festival director Carlos R. Ríos recalled this before the audience at the Teatre del CCCB last Saturday, March 21. The sixteenth edition had barely begun, and we were already facing the festival’s highlight: the D’A Award. Céline Sciamma, Alice Rohrwacher, Joanna Hogg, Bruno Dumont, Béla Tarr (Honorary Award!). This is no minor prize.
Enrique Costa, a key distributor of Hansen-Løve’s work in Spain through Elastica Films, presented her. Costa feels like a “peer” of her generation and admitted he was pleasantly surprised by the youth of the audience, which he sees as both a renewal and proof of the continued relevance of the French filmmaker’s cinema, with eight films under her belt. “It’s important that Mia Hansen-Løve keeps making films,” he concluded in his speech. These are not empty words or ‘wishful thinking’. Costa is producing the filmmaker’s next project, as she has found in Spain a community that both understands and stimulates her. “I will shoot part of my next film in Spain. This country has become the one that supports my cinema the most. It’s something that still surprises me.” Beyond Elastica, Hansen-Løve refers to filmmakers she feels in tune with, such as Carla Simón, producer Paco Poch, Jonás Trueba and Jaume Claret Muxart.
During the following hour, the award-winning director held a conversation with the festival’s critic, Philipp Engel. Thanks to his insistence, the audience heard early details about the shift that her next film will represent. “I never thought I would make a period biopic,” a project that has led her into an especially long financing phase. Every one of the French filmmaker’s projects has faced major challenges: “It always takes a lot of effort, I suffer a lot with financing, but that means I never get bored.” The effort is worth it. This time, Mia Hansen-Løve will tell the story of the 18th-century philosopher and feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft — none other than the mother of writer Mary Shelley.
Despite having reached what Engel described as “the end of a path” in her filmography, he highlighted certain defining traits of her cinema that seem unlikely to change. As she herself said, a painter also returns again and again to certain styles and themes. Violence has no place in her frames: “I think the world is already violent enough. It’s not about denying it, but about making a manifesto of keeping it out of my films.” Hansen-Løve strives to find emotion elsewhere, emerging from a deeper place, in a search she admits she will never fully resolve. “It’s not naïveté, nor about representing only life’s pleasures, but I do need everything to move toward the light.”
Light itself — almost always captured on film — is one of the many wonders of her work. Light, landscapes, locations. This is where she devotes most of her time, alongside an essential collaborator in her creative process: her script supervisor Clémentine Schaeffer — co-author of her first feature — a friend and professional who understands her completely and accompanies her on all location scouts. “It’s the most beautiful moment of the whole process,” she confessed.
The spaces are then filled with characters, who often simply move through them in extended scenes of apparent “transition”: “I film these moments of movement because my films are character portraits, and I instinctively need to feel how they move.” Is this an inheritance from the Nouvelle Vague? Hansen-Løve feels more indebted to certain Eastern filmmakers, such as Yasujirō Ozu. Even so, she readily acknowledges her place within the European tradition, perhaps even more than within a specifically French one. This stems from her Germanic family background, which also connects her to philosophy, languages… disciplines she cannot help but turn into the professions of her characters. “I couldn’t make a film about characters I dislike. I think we must film in their favor, we must film in favor. And that defines my relationship with actors,” which she approaches as a process of refinement toward simplicity, capturing a certain innocence. She cited Isabelle Huppert — with whom she worked only on L’avenir (2016) — as a brilliant example of this acting talent.
Her new film wonders If Love Should Die. Let us hope, at the very least, that Mia Hansen-Løve’s love never dies.
Download D’A – Festival de Cinema de Barcelona’s Fanzine #05 dedicated to Mia Hansen-Løve.
