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Interview with Paola Tomás Marques

Two Times João Liberada (Duas vezes João Liberada) is the first feature directed by Paola Tomás Marques. I had the pleasure of sitting down with the director to discuss this fascinating and surprising film, which was screened in the Perspectives section at the Berlinale.

The Disapproving Swede: So since you’re a new director, at least for me, maybe you can tell me a little about yourself.

Paola Tomás Marques: I’ve made several shorts before this first feature. There are a lot of themes that I’ve been working on since the beginning, like gender, sexuality, and historiography. I have a background in sociology. Still, I’ve studied in two different film schools, one in Lisbon, which has a more classical approach to cinema, and Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, which is open to different genres and ways of seeing cinema. But I am trying to explore experimental cinema.

TDS: Where is the latter located?

It’s in San Sebastián. It’s connected to the Filmoteca Basca and the San Sebastián festival.

TDS: If I understand correctly, this is a fictional character, but it is based on certain filed cases.

PTM: João Liberada is a fictional character created based on files from the Inquisition trials about gender non-conforming people—or that is what we would view them as today. This character is born from many thoughts about this investigation and what historians would say and write about these trials. It is also about being able to be critical but also self-critical about how we think of cinema, how we think about representing queer people in cinema, and it’s kind of a mix of all these things.

TDS: Are there many of those documents? I imagine these things may happen in secret sometimes.

PTM: When we talk about the Inquisition, we’re talking about people who were persecuted and judged then. For example, sodomy was a crime during the Inquisition, and people would be persecuted and judged for that, imprisoned, and sometimes burned at the stake. In Portugal, the latter was rare. Regarding the documents, they are legal ones written by the inquisitors. We didn’t focus on that part of the trials and of the life of João Librada, but the director in the film wants to focus on those kinds of ideas.

Two Times João Liberada

TDS: What was the genesis of the project? Not only the story but also the stylistic parts.

The stylistic part was a natural way of thinking about it. We wanted the setting, the sets, and how we filmed to be almost documentary-like. We wanted it to be a film made by a small team that could change their departments and work a little bit on everything. We wanted it to be flexible. I think the film’s cinematography is also flexible in that sense, and we try to use that in our favour. That’s also why the film is so diverse stylistically, and that’s why it crosses so many genres, from historical drama to a little bit of thriller and essay films.

TDS: And a bunch of meta-film aspects.

PTM: Yes, and meta-film aspects. So we wanted it to be rich in that sense of understanding how we can explore every device of cinema possible to put these questions on the table and play a little bit about what it is like to find the language on a film, what is the language of the director (in the film), and which is the one in our film.

You can notice in the film that when we have a historical scene by the director, suddenly the image is a little bit more orange and has a different colour grading. So, we also tried to play with that. It was really important for us for the film to be playful in general.

TDS: I will get back to some of that playfulness later. This director character, is that based on your experience in some way? I mean, the way he tries to simplify things and push his will through?

PTM: The director is a mix of my experiences working on shootings in general and hearing stories from friends. Those testimonies of working on movie sets created this character, but there are some self-critical aspects of that character—things I regret doing. In film school, I was taught that method acting was the best tool for actors, and in my first school film, I tried to apply those things. I quickly understood that it didn’t make sense in the end and that it explored too much of the personal and emotional life of the actors. Still, finding myself too much in that character is difficult.

TDS: I don’t want to overstate the resemblance between you and the director, but I like that you added that self-critical part. The director is not a simple villain.

PTM: We didn’t want him to be a simple villain. For us, it’s much more interesting to think of him as a person surrounded by people with lots of expectations on how to direct. I think that this director may also have all those kinds of pressures.

Two Times João Liberada

Paola Tomás Marques about her influences

TDS: I will approach the theme many directors don’t like to discuss – influences. We critics tend to compare what we see with other films. In this case, a colleague and I thought of Oliveira’s Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe when the spirit appeared.

PTM: That makes so much sense. I saw Benilde when I was in film school, and it was a film that really influenced me. It was inspiring back then. I haven’t seen it for a long time, but when I rewatched my film recently, I noticed that it connects to Benilde in a way that I thought was beautiful. It is interesting that you both thought of that.

TDS: Any other influences that come to your mind?

PTM: Pasolini, for sure; it was also a director that I really followed during film school. There’s something about how he portrays historical moments with a playfulness and a kind of campiness regarding the clothes of the nuns and all of that. I think he plays well with that anachronism. There are also Sheryl Dunya’s The Watermelon Woman and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One by William Greaves, which are references that came to use during the making of the film. Teresa Villaverdes Os mutantes as well.

TDS: What, specifically about Os mutantes?

PTM: Os Mutantes has inspired me since I was in film school, and it still does. I’ve seen it a bunch of times. I learned a lot about editing from that film.

TDS: It’s my favourite of her films.

PTM:. Mine too. All my films have been inspired by it in one way or another. When you think about it, you feel there’s a break in the stylistic thinking. I think Villaverde introduced a new style in Portuguese cinema with that film. Sometimes, there is a stereotypical way of talking about Portuguese cinema. Not that there is anything wrong with the old masters, not at all, but this is something else. She has influences like Bresson, for sure, but there is something fresh with that generation of filmmakers.

TDS: I want to come back to the playfulness. When I heard a specific piece of music being used (spoiler redacted), I sighed and hoped it would be ironic. Later, it became clear that it was. Thank you for that.

PTM: (Laughing) Perfect! That’s exactly what we wanted you to feel. We wanted to play with the overuse of this type of music in cinema.

TDS: How did you approach the cinematography? You talked about the practical stuff, but how about the aesthetics?

PTM: there’s one thing that I think is important about the aesthetic, that I think it’s what kind of brings cohesion to the film, which is the electrical device on the film, sound and image…

TDS: … Son et image like Godard used to say.

PTM: Yes. So, this idea of the lights burning the 16-millimetre film, how that becomes a device to explore hunting, to explore speaking about what’s happening at that moment, to invoke past moments suddenly in some parts of the film, even in terms of sound: What is comfortable, what is uncomfortable. At some point, the sound gets a bit awkward and glitchy. The electricity is, kind of, the main vehicle of the aesthetic of the film.

It was also a question of which shots should be handheld and which should be filmed on a tripod.
The choice of the former was the flexibility I mentioned earlier. In other scenes, we needed stillness, for example, in those night scenes. We wanted those to feel more like a horror film. It is also about being in a place where the camera doesn’t move, but something is moving in the shot, in the sound, so we needed those different approaches in different parts of the film to get to the film we have and its aesthetic.

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11/05/2025
Forever Creator Mara Brock Akil on Falling in Love With Screenwriting

Mara Brock Akil always wanted to be a writer. What she didn’t know was how to make a living at it. So she pursued the practical thing and attended one of the country’s top journalism schools, Northwestern University. There, she quickly realized two things: She loved higher education and journalism was not for her.

Working at a newspaper internship, she decided that “the news is not interested in the humanity of us. They didn’t care about the stories I thought were real news and should be included. I was leaning more toward feature-type of writing.”

She pivoted to advertising, but after a friend invited her to an Organization of Black Screenwriters meeting hosted by producer Gus Blackmon, she found her “heart’s desire.” She talked her way into a screenwriting class and wrote her first script, a romantic project called Limits, about a girl in college.

“I went to class and my whole life changed,” she says. “I wrote a script and I fell in love. I had endless energy. I didn’t need to eat. I was in love, and I wanted to be in that world. My whole life changed.”

After graduating, she turned down an advertising job to work as an assistant manager at the Gap in Chicago. The retailer’s management program taught her the skills she’d need to eventually run her own show. She also frequented comedy clubs, where she befriended Mark Adkins, Sinbad’s brother and manager.

“Eventually I knew I had to be in L.A. I couldn’t be John Hughes off the bat and stay in Chicago,” she recalls. She packed up and called Adkins, who was launching The Sinbad Show. He had one job opening left, for a production assistant. Brock Akil jumped at the chance, and wound up meeting writers like Ralph Farquhar and Michael Weithorn, as well as renowned dancer/director/actor Debbie Allen.

“The Sinbad Show was my breakthrough. I got to meet all these writers in that community and be a part of that community, and that’s why I moved along,” she says.

“I was talented with my script, but before they saw my script they saw me. I was on time. I was helpful. Vibes and bringing that energy and spirit and knowing people’s names was my job. All of it matters.”

Through her connections with Farquhar and Weithorn, Brock Akil became a writing trainee on their show South Central in 1994. Two years later, Farquhar enlisted her for the writing staff on Moesha. She was 25 years old.

“And I have not looked back,” she says. “Ralph had a lovely way of rejecting my pitches when I would not give up. He would say, ‘Hey Mara, heard you, love it. But how about you save that for your pilot?’ I started going home and writing down all the things that I was saving for my pilot.”

In 2000, Brock Akil realized her dream of creating and running her own show with the launch of Girlfriends, which ran for eight seasons. Six years later, she also created the nine-season spinoff The Game.

“If you look at TV, you’d think everybody has a murder mystery and everybody’s gonna be in the car chase. That’s not how my life rolls,” she says.

“My pen wants to figure out how to craft people’s real biggest dramas that still entertain and tell a story that is riveting, captivating, funny, emotional, and how the majority of us are actually experiencing life.”

Also Read: Cobra Kai Showrunners Wax On About Its Beginning and End

In 2013, Brock Akil continued that approach with the four-season run of Being Mary Jane, starring Gabrielle Union as a talk show host balancing her personal and work lives. Five years later, the creative got even more personal with the 10-episode series Love Is, which was inspired by her real-life marriage to writer and producing partner Salim Akil. The project explored love between a modern power couple in Black Hollywood in the 1990s.

These days, the real-life couple works together under Akil Productions, but they continue to pursue their own writing projects. As Akil ventures more into art and different mediums of expression, Brock Akil remains interested in relationships and stories around the nuances of love and characters. She’s also passionate about teaching other writers through her residency program, The Writers’ Colony.

“I’m telling my stories and I have this urgency to stay focused on me and follow my heart. To do that, I have to build out more community and more relationships,” she says. “I’m also really excited about The Writers’ Colony, and I want to build that. Salim and I were just over here, the two of us making things together beautifully and I love that era, but you have to keep building out and I’m excited to be in this era, too.”

Mara Brock Akil on Adapting the Judy Blume Novel Forever

Lovie Simone as Keisha in Forever. Photo by Elizabeth Morris / Netflix

What’s on the creative’s heart in this era is her children, and she’s been thinking a lot about the world they’re growing up in.

And so, under an overall deal with Netflix she struck in 2020, she’s adapted Judy Blume’s 1975 novel Forever, which has been frequently banned in schools and libraries for its depictions of teen love.

Notably, the first project she executive produced for Netflix, 2023’s Stamped from the Beginning, was based on Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. A version of the book aimed at young readers was No. 2 on the American Library Association’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2020.

“I was never really an IP person — I love original stories. I do think you’ll see that in Forever. But my first entries into IP, and I’m going for all the banned books,” she laughs. “It’s funny. I love it. It tickles me that the banned book is now going to go global.”

In adapting Forever, Brock Akil focused on the novel’s essence rather than exact plot points, and added modern teen challenges like social media. In depicting how Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) fall for each other, Brock Akil collaborated with Blume to remain focused on the book’s initial intent and spirit.

“Judy wrote Forever for her daughter in a lot of ways. For young women, it was a pivotal time of agency where the birth control pill was out there and they could think about protecting their future and exploring healthy sex and love,” she says.

“Here I am as a Black mother in the 2020s and I want to see my son have agency as a young Black boy. And now that he’s interested in girls, not become America’s No. 1 threat. Where is his future in the ability to explore his love life and sexuality without being off the bat a criminal? That me and my husband have to talk to our son about rape before he understands love is very harsh, but you’ve got to protect them while they’re also out there trying to figure out who they are.”

Brock Akil says that just as Blume was making space for young girls to see themselves as full human beings and not in service to men, Forever makes space for Black teenagers in a society that isn’t always welcoming.

“How can we be in service to our own lives?” she asks. “I was a journalist. I’m observing the truth, this lived experience, and I want to tell it through fiction. My specificity, my heart’s desire, my musing, is my window into universal storytelling.”

Forever is streaming on Netflix beginning Thursday.

Main image: Mara Brock Akil. Photo by Elizabeth Morris / Netflix

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06/05/2025
The Trouble With Jessica — Every Movie Has a Lesson

MOVIE REVIEW: The Trouble With Jessica — Every Movie Has a Lesson

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05/05/2025
From Hilde, With Love – Review from Glasgow Film Festival

German cinema has long been coming to terms with the nation’s past. Films like Downfall, Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, The Tin Drum and Das Boot, all offer a unique perspective on life in Germany during World War Two. It’s a confronting position, as a viewer, that often makes you wonder if you could ever defy the horrors that unfold onscreen.

One woman who did attempt to defy the Nazi regime was Hilde Coppi (Liv Lisa Fries). Along with her husband, Hans (Johannes Hegemann), she sent radio messages in Morse code to Russia, distributed anti-Nazi materials across Berlin, put up anti-Nazi posters around the city and wrote letters to mothers whose sons were named on Radio Moscow. Both she and Hans were part of a friendship group who undertook all of these activities, knowing that getting caught would mean death. Director Andreas Dresen’s film, From Hilde, With Love, is told in a non-linear structure, allowing us to get a full and compelling understanding of a woman who stood up to be counted.

What’s interesting about Hilde’s story is that we’re even getting to hear about it at all. So many films in the war genre focus on the derring-do of male spies or resistors. Indeed, this could have been a film about Hans. But writer Laila Stieler gives us a fascinating portrayal of Hilde, instead, both as a young woman and during her incarceration at Plötzensee. It’s not a hagiography, either, as her flaws are laid bare through Liv Lisa Fries’ formidable central performance. She is complex and full of life; a woman you can admire and pity.

Owing the narrative structure, the film jumps back and forth throughout Hilde’s life. When we meet her in the past, the scenes are vibrant and colourful, infused with a cosy yellow glow. There’s dances and sex and drinking. Even when the friends are plotting their next move, there’s a joyfulness about their decision to take a stand. We get to watch a beautiful love story, too, as Hans slowly becomes less wary about his “prudish” new recruit. That, too, breathes life into both characters as we get to see them in moments of desire and bliss. In contrast, Hilde’s present is full of steely greys and sterile blues; hospital creams and washed out greens. Prison life is harsh and unforgiving – not least because Hilde has just given birth to a son and the restrictive diet means she is not producing enough milk for him to survive.

The performances give the film the weight that it needs. Liv Lisa Fries is utterly captivating as Hilde. It is a deeply complex, emotional performance that allows us to see Hilde at her rational best and devastated worst. She isn’t just some grainy photograph in a history book, she is a living, breathing woman fighting for her life. Fries rejects the cliche of the ‘warrior woman’ and, instead, gives us a historical figure who is practical, softly-spoken and interesting. She possesses a resilience that neither her mother nor her fellow prisoners seem to emulate. It’s incredibly powerful to watch. She also does a phenomenal job with a botched birth scene that is difficult to endure as a viewer.

The drudgery of prison life is fully realised, here, but you cannot help but feel the palpable tension that permeates the cell doors. Hilde’s particular wing of political prisoners have yet to face their farcical trials and death is surely just a signature away. That unease is always lingering below the surface, even when Hilde is spending time with her son or nursing other prisoners. The thin blade of the guillotine feels mere inches away, at all times. When it does come, we are given a beautiful moment of Hilde enjoying the warmth of the sun on her face one last time, before Teutonic efficiency means it’s her turn to place her neck on the block.

From Hilde, With Love is not designed to make you cry; it’s meant to make you feel the weight of history on your shoulders. It should make you question if you could ever be so brave (and perhaps thankful that you’ve never had to be). It’s a truly fascinating portrait of one of World War Two’s most compelling figures.

From Hilde, With Love has its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival. Get your tickets here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFj7RVBRD1o

Editor at Moviescramble. European cinema, grisly thrillers and show stopping musicals are my bag. Classic Hollywood Cinema is comfort food. Spare time is heavily dependent on a lot of pizza and power ballads.

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16/04/2025
Glasgow Film Festival celebrates its 21st edition with over 33,000 attendances

Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) wrapped the 21st edition of Scotland’s flagship film festival after an epic 12 days, featuring 114 feature films from 39 countries at Glasgow Film Theatre and nine other venues across the city, attracting over 33,000 attendances.

For the first time in its history, the festival opened and closed with Scottish world premieres – John Maclean’s Tornado and Make it to Munich from Martyn Robertson. The programme continued to spotlight Scottish talent with Glasgow-shot, Amazon studios drama Fear being given a big-screen premiere at GFT, and Edinburgh director Laura Carreira’s debut feature On Falling screening at 10 partnering cinemas across the UK.

The celebration of Scottish film on screen extended beyond the film programme into the GFF industry programme that returned for its 10th edition this year. GFF continues to be the major meeting point for the Scottish filmmaking sector, welcoming almost 750 delegates to the festival. The event – at brand new venue The Social Hub Glasgow – hosted the four-day conference that offered panels, 1-2-1 meetings and networking opportunities for delegates at all stages of their screen careers.

GFF25 Industry Focus saw Kaljeven Lally (writer), Isabella Bassett (producer) and Jena Hunter’s (producer) Responsibility win the inaugural Funny Features Industry Audience Award. The feature follows Sanjeev who quickly becomes suspect-number-one in a bizarre murder case and the target of two opposing crime families, the police, and not to mention… his parents. Industry Focus’ newest talent lab gave participants access to one-to-one consultancy sessions, workshops and bespoke mentoring to support the development of their projects.

This year also brought the sophomore year of the Animatic Talent Development scheme to facilitate the development of Scottish creatives’ animated features, TV series and short film ideas. This saw three award winners and a special mention at The Animatic Live Pitch. The winner for Best TV/Feature Pitch was animated Scottish folk mystery Lochs & Legends by Abi Lamb and the award for Best Short Pitch went to To Myself and the Forest of Tigers by Sammi Duong. Overlords, an animated adult comedy series from Hannah Kelso was also presented with the inaugural Animatic Industry Audience Award. Finally, a special mention was awarded to The Three Graces by Wilma Smith.

© Eoin Carey

The festival’s free programme of events this year included its daily free morning retrospective screenings, which welcomed hundreds of movie-goers each day to enjoy classics like Gregory’s Girl, Lady Bird and Boyz n the Hood on the big screen. GFF also worked with communities around the city to co-create a Community Takeover Day at Garnethill Multicultural Centre, which featured a free screening of Ukrainian sci-fi drama U Are The Universe, plus food and activities for all ages. This event was made possible with the help of the Glasgow 850 Festival Fund, as was the Festival’s Young Ambassador programme, a GFF initiative for 18-25 year old’s to learn more about the festival and stage their own pop-up cinema event.

Bringing cinematic gems and the talent behind them to Glasgow is what the festival does best, as was the case with the sell-out showing of the classic Australian film Muriel’s Wedding, where Toni Collette surprised the audience to join a GFF / ABBA lip sync. The Australian star said, “It really amazes me that an experience that changed my life profoundly still resonates with people and means so much to people and continues to inspire people so thank you for having her [Muriel] here tonight. I’m quite moved.”

GFF welcomed a multitude of famous faces onto the red-carpet including Jessica Lange, James McAvoy, Tim Roth, Ed Harris, George Mackay and Martin Compston. The festival also marked its final year under GFF director Allison Gardner, who retires from Glasgow Film in October.

© Eoin Carey

Isabel Davis, Executive Director of Screen Scotland, said: “Screen Scotland is proud to be the major backer of Glasgow Film Festival, which has outdone itself once again with a powerful programme of films and events. Emblematic of the power of cinema to inspire and assemble people, the programme and guest speakers have drawn a fantastic response from the public. Meanwhile, the industry programme has taken another leap forward, convening local and international industry like never before, sparking industry conversations and myriad new connections across the week.

“This festival also marks the final edition under the leadership of Allison Gardner, whose passion, vision, and dedication have been central to shaping GFF into the world-class event it is today. We thank her for everything she has done for film in Scotland and beyond, and wish her all the very best for the future.”

This year’s Audience Award was won by Brian Durnin’s Spilt Milk.

Glasgow Film Festival will return for its 22nd edition in 2026 with the full programme revealed in January. Festival dates will be announced soon. A selection of films from GFF25 will screen at the GFT throughout 2025 with On Falling, The End, and Just Another Girl on the IRT screening this month.

You can find all of the Moviescramble GFF25 coverage here.

Editor at Moviescramble. European cinema, grisly thrillers and show stopping musicals are my bag. Classic Hollywood Cinema is comfort food. Spare time is heavily dependent on a lot of pizza and power ballads.

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15/04/2025
Sinners review – links the past and present with music and blood

Sinners review – links the past and present with music and blood

About Little White Lies

Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.

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13/04/2025
Interview with Frédéric Hambalek – intriguing

Frédéric Hambalek’s sophomore feature, What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle weiß), reviewed here, was screened in this year’s Berlinale competition as one of two German films. I was able to interview the director a few days after the premiere.

I’ve read that you don’t think about genres. When did you realize that this story was a comedy?

Frédéric Hambalek: I’m still surprised how much people think this is a comedy. I was extremely surprised at the premiere that people were laughing out loud. I knew that the idea had some funny aspects, and I also think that it had some awkward and dark, cringy, dramatic aspects to it. So yes, I probably think it leans a bit more comical, but I never thought this would be read as much as a comedy as they’re doing it right here in Berlinale.

I’m interested in casting because I think the characters have such good chemistry on screen, which is very important, and they perhaps bring the comedy and the openness of it. Can you talk about that?

FH: Casting is a bit miraculous; it has so much to do with who is available and who wants to do this. We arrived with Julia Jentsch, who plays the mother first, and I thought she would be very good in this role because she [typically] portrays very likeable characters, and this character is maybe not all that likeable. Then, I could look at people who would fit her, and Felix Kramer was interesting because he would typically play very physical characters. I don’t know if you’ve seen his film [Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything], but two years ago at Berlinale, he played this very sexual, male, hands-on guy.

Laeni Geisele as the titular character in What Marielle Knows by Frédéric Hambalek.

The DIsapproving Swede: After the screening, I talked to German critics who said this story is very German. I know that Germans are very wary of giving their data away and are worried about their privacy. Lots of things are analogue. Do you think that this is a typical German topic?

FH. I don’t think so at all. I think it translates well to every Western society where we face issues of how open we want to be with our lives. Isn’t it in Norway where you have to show all your taxes, and everybody can see?

TDS: It’s like that in Sweden as well. You can see anything. People check on each other before dates. I saw an ad from a company selling extra information with the headline, “Check your date before Valentine’s Day”.

FH: That is incredibly interesting to me. I could not imagine that happening in Germany at all. It sounds a bit funny, though. I could imagine people sweating when they introduced themselves and thinking. Oh, now everybody knows I’m not that person in my presentation.

The interview with Frédéric Hambalek goes Nordic

TDS: So if the film felt very German to those German friends I talked to, it felt pretty Nordic to me—for instance, the environment with those minimalistic interiors. I’m wondering if you can talk about the contrast between the home and the office. As far as I’ve read, the publishing office was the only set in the film.

FH: it was an actual office space, but we transformed it a lot. We were going for very modern places because they are open. You can see everything, they have glass walls and so on. Still, I didn’t want to push too hard on this metaphor. For example, we don’t observe through the glass in the office building, as you would do in a surveillance video. I would always say, “Let’s come up with the camera close and frame them with the camera. Use long lenses, go into a very intimate space and single them out under a very intimidatingly close lens to give the feeling of somebody observing them all the time”.

TDS: Which camera did you use?

We used the Alexa 35. And the more we shot, the more we used longer and longer lenses. In the end, it was like 70 or 100-millimeter lenses.

Julia Jentsch and Felix Kramer in What Marielle Knows by Frédéric Hambalek.

TDS: Thinking about the music, why the Razumovsky Quartets? Obviously, they are great pieces of music, but was there a specific reason for that choice?

FH: I went about it very intuitively. I knew that the music should be there to give you some sense of something that is not completely real, a bit out of this world. I quickly found the first Beethoven piece, which was used in the scene with the slap in slow-mo. It was intuitive that I thought this was the right tone. It has something ironic to me, but also serious.

TDS: So, the question that every director dreads: Do you have any influences from other directors? Maybe something that takes place in this kind of modern environment.

The film that made me want to be a director was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I saw on TV when I was 13. didn’t get it, of course, and I turned it off after an hour because I was so bored. But I could not stop thinking about it. All these Kubrick films really taught me early on that the art form is very free.

TDS: Nothing specific for this film?

When pressed on that question, I always thought about Force Majeure by Ruben Östlund just because of how they are acting. You will write this now, but I say it anyway. And I thought, “Look at this film”. I still thought that my film would get away from it in a way. I looked at that film as a way of checking out someone who does something you might think is in the right vein. At the same time, I knew that my film would be formally different.

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13/04/2025
Interview with Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani presented their fourth film. Reflection in a Dead Diamond in this year’s Berlinale competition. Since it was the most exhilarating film at the festival, I was thrilled to be able to sit down with the couple to discuss this multifaceted work (pun intended).

The Disapproving Swede: So, the project more or less started with Fabio Testi. Could you talk a bit about that?

Bruno Forzani: It’s a long story because my mother was a big fan of Fabio Testi, and my sister would have had the name Fabio if she had been a boy. I discovered him through Italian B-movies, and I loved him. He was also in Zulawski’s L’Important, c’est d’aimer; in 2010, we watched Road to Nowhere by Monte Hellman, and Testi’s character reminded us of Sean Connery.

Hélène Cattet: He was dressed in a white suit. It reminded us about Death in Venice, too. So we thought, “What if we mix those two antagonist universes to create something like a new universe?”

BF: We also saw a staging of Tosca, the opera, by Christophe Honoré. He treated it like Sunset Boulevard, and that kind of treatment was an inspiration for our film. We wrote the script with Fabio Testi in mind. We managed to meet him and were fascinated by him because we saw his eyes just in front of us, which we had only seen in close-ups in movies. We began to talk about directing actors just through the eyes, and it was the first time we met an actor who was used to that.

Then, we told him we would shoot on film, and he was surprised and agreed to do the movie. It was great because Fabio synthesized the mix we wanted to do between this Euro spy genre and Death in Venice. He was in Italian Westerns, but he was in other kinds of films as well, so it was a perfect match.

Bruno Forzani, Hélène Cattet and Fabio Testi.

TDS: When he got the script, his first reaction was that he didn’t understand anything, right?

BF: Yeah, exactly, but it was the same with Monte Hellman. He did not understand the script, but he trusted him, and when we met him, he trusted us, so voila!

How do you synthesize all these ideas and different references to build a story, even if it is a story on your own terms? Your films are mostly vibes, so how do you make a story out of this? Is it organic?

HC: It was really technical this time because we were building the story with different layers of narration. We put one colour for each line of narration, three altogether. Then, we could organize how those layers will interweave and respond to each other. You develop different thematics and different points of view because you can see the movie from different angles. Each spectator can find a way to experience the film so that two spectators can see a different movie. We aim to be playful and create a game for the audience.

BF: When we write the script, we are writing it technically with detailed descriptions of every detail you will see and hear in the movie. It is not typical since we live in a French-speaking culture, and the cinema world is more literate than cinematic.

HC: We really want to tell the story using cinematographic means, not through dialogue.

TDS: You call it storytelling. Is the story the most crucial thing, rather than the cinematic expression, or don’t you see a contrast?

HC: There’s no contrast between the form and the content. It’s one thing. The form tells the story, not the content.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani about Diamond structure

TDS: When it comes to stylistics, I thought a bit about Raoul Ruiz. You mentioned playfulness, and he had a way of toying with clichés and adding narrative layers in a complex, sometimes crystal structure.

BF: You are not the first to say that regarding the film’s construction.

TDS: Gilles Deleuze described Alain Resnais and other directors as having a crystalline structure, but here, we even have a diamond structure where things go through reflections and refractions.

HC: Exactly!

BF: Since the beginning, the word diamond was in the title. It wasn’t the same title, but we constructed the film like a diamond because there are several facets.

HC: Yes, that’s why you can see the movie like a diamond through different prisms.

TDS: You talked about Op art earlier. You have different art styles in all your films. Can you talk a bit more about the use of op art in this film?

BF: The film is about illusion because you don’t know if the past of the hero is an illusion or if it’s reality. The past is represented by this horror-spy aesthetic, where you think the world was funny and very pop-like, but the heroes were violent, in fact. It is a fake representation of the world. Since the film is about illusion, the structure is an illusion, too, because of the different layers. Op art was the perfect art to approach the story visually. In fact, when we began to work on the script, we went to Nice. There was a big Op art exhibition there, which inspired us.

TDS: You mentioned Clozuot’s La Prisionnière. Were there other films using Op art that inspired you as well?

BF: The funny thing is that the Italian B-movies we mentioned are exploitation movies but use a lot of art and Op art. There is also Mario Caiano’s L’Occhio nel labirinto. James Bond films are another example, like The Man with the Golden Gun, where you have a kind of labyrinth, which is very Op art. It’s a very funny art form since it’s mixed with something very popular.

TDS: A last, tangential musical question: You use a piece from Catalani’s La Wally [Ebben? Ne andrò lontana], made famous by the film Diva. Isn’t it the exact same recording as in Diva?

BF: Yes, exactly. In this version, there is an introduction that you don’t have in the original, and I love this introduction. I discovered opera with Diva, and I love that piece.

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13/04/2025