There are framed wedding photos on the wall, open albums of holiday memories on the table. This is a household of gestures rehearsed for decades. The filmmaker meets life as lived in her grandparents’ Luxembourg home. She tries on her grandfather’s coat and her grandmother’s rings. Out of boredom? Or is it an appropriation of history? Time seems to stand still and yet moves inexorably forward. He takes a nap in a sleeping mask that has open eyes printed on it, she sits at the kitchen table and talks about the onset of her dementia. She enjoys a cigarette by the window to the fullest, letting her granddaughter paint her nails pink. Perhaps to look good on camera, while the grandfather swings his hips to the music from the radio. The couple wrest touching moments from the sense of transience, while a pas de deux tells of love and attachment.
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Tehran and other major cities seem far away from the place where Sara lives. But in her rural community in northwestern Iran, the protagonist of this film advocates the same feminist values in a practical, everyday way. Again and again, we are reminded by the images that her father once taught her to ride a motorbike – to the disapproval of the whole village. A small favour with big consequences: For Sara, it paved a way outside patriarchal marriage. Mobile on two wheels, she works as a midwife and has delivered many girls for whom she now wants to fight: At the start of the film and in middle age, Sara decides to be the first woman in the history of her community to run for the local council. A step which earns her enthusiastic support on the one hand; on the other, she must endure open hostilities and an interrogation by the moral enforcers of the Islamic Republic. In “Cutting Through Rocks”, Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni capture these power structures and their individual impact as precisely as the gestures of solidarity and self-determination.
“There was a body that didn’t want to be human. It didn’t know it belonged to someone. To me.” María Cristina Pérez González opens her film with these poetic and cryptic words, diving deep into the visually powerful, hand-painted animation. Associative rather than narrative, the sad voice pulls us into a maelstrom of remembered fragments that all revolve around the protagonist’s body: A voluminous shape that sometimes eats itself with loathing, stretches until it fills the frame or cowers like a pea – in the blackness of the fluid, generous brushstrokes, but above all in its own fleshy self.
There is the estranged sister who once called the feet of this body ugly. The good friend who disappeared without a farewell. The father who once said that all unhappy women grow fat. And most of all there is this nameless figure that lives in her belly and feeds her depression with a cute grin. As so often in life, the only path to contentment is reconciliation. With the sister, of course, but above all with her own body which does not fit into narrow social norms – but is the only one she has. And with which she can dance, jump, and even laugh quite splendidly once she understands that it is not a monster to be fought.
Like her previous film, “Elementary”, Claire Simon’s latest work pays homage to the educational process, once again opening the doors of school classrooms. This time, texts by Annie Ernaux – a French feminist, writer and Nobel Prize winner – are on the curriculum. Ernaux describes her concept of autosociobiography as “writing life, not mine, nor theirs, nor even one in particular. Life with situations that we all go through, but that we, as individuals, experience differently. Body image, education, the sense of belonging, sexual condition, social trajectory, the existence of others, disease, grief. […] I did not try to write about myself, to write a book about my life. I made use of my life, of the general, ordinary events of my life, of the situations and feelings I have experienced. As if it were material I needed to explore to grasp and uncover some kind of perceptible truth.”
The teachers create smart frameworks for discussions filled with freedom and dynamics, where the young people reveal themselves in all their beauty and vulnerability, extrapolating the author’s experiences to their own lives. And this is when Claire Simon’s “writing life camera” documents charming moments of how Ernaux’s texts empower and inspire them, as they passionately delve into her words.
