Sandrine Kiberlain is an actress, singer and today she is also a director. In 1996, she won the César for best female hope for her role as Alice in the film To have or not) by Laetitia Masson and the César for best actress in 2014 for 9 months firm by Albert Dupontel. Wednesday, January 26, 2022 releases his first film: A young girl who is well. Stressed ?
Sandrine Kiberlain: Yes, it’s stress mixed with emotion. I decided everything in this story, so I put myself forward a lot. I expose myself a lot and through this heroine, there is a lot of me, of my origins. It’s not like when you’re an actress and you’re hiding behind someone else’s story.
franceinfo: This is the story of a young girl who is doing well, her name is Irene. She is Jewish. She lived her 19th birthday to the full during the summer of 1942. It’s a look at what happened, it’s a look at the importance of remaining vigilant.
Yes that’s it. It was talking about this threatening time, otherwise, for a French Jewish family, who love each other, who thought they were safe. And then they will very quickly understand that ultimately, the threat can affect them too.
“It’s a film that takes place during the Occupation, but I intentionally made a film that brings viewers back to our time too.”
Sandrine Kiberlainat franceinfo
It was important for me that they are French in this France where they feel protected, then they see that it will not last. But they don’t know what the next day will be like, while the viewer knows what we know about the history of this period of the 1940s when the world changed.
I deal with the “rocking” front, the beginnings of this monster lurking in the shadows like that, which we know and which we fear to see appear, while my heroine, who is 19, is not only interested in being 19, in the theater she wants to do, in the actress she wants to become, in her first love.
It is also a tribute that you pay to your family, to those who accompanied you. Your grandfather Frenchified his name during the war, we are really at the heart of the matter.
Yes, but without really talking about them either. He was a Polish Jew by origin and they came to France in 1933. They were 20 years old and they each had a little what I say in the film, very different reactions with the rules that come as they come, which make them people who no longer really know what Jew means, what Jew implies. And as the story progresses, each takes its new restrictions in its own way. The father protects the children and respects the laws, the grandmother, who has a very rebellious and young spirit, is more instinctive and against, and does not want to give them that.
In fact, she doesn’t want to have a stamp on her identity card that says ‘Jewish’. She can’t have that yellow star.
She doesn’t want to fall into these new recommendations and turn the Jewess she is into someone different. She does not want to.
Your grandmother was pretty amazing.
She knew how to confront someone who was close to the family, a policeman, and who came to get her. She was pregnant and under the order of the Nazis, she stripped naked to show her belly. It’s more than strong, survival instincts like that, I hear a lot. I think that in situations as crazy and as risky, as tragic, we do not know what we would do to defend ourselves and to defend those close to us. But I think we are capable of things like that, for example. She was pregnant with my mother.
What is your relationship to this Jewishness? I’m Jewish, it’s me, it’s my DNA, it’s my family, it’s my origins. We don’t know who we are if we don’t know where we come from. Elie Wiesel said: “Beware of not knowing your story. We could make you relive it one day”. I am in this memory, in the desire not to forget, in the desire to tell all the people who went through this time and this madness and who will end up disappearing at some point.
“We must take over, tell and show how this inhumanity must no longer return, must no longer be debated today.”
Sandrine Kiberlainat franceinfo
It was important to find a point of view to tell this period, differently, and therefore by the joy of living, by this youth that I tell, this young girl and her young entourage.
Irène takes advantage of every moment, takes refuge in the theatre, an enormous passion for her, her outlet. What is also surprising, is this age 19 years. She discovers that she is passionate about theatre. Is it a nod to your career?
Yes it’s clear. When I was writing, I said to myself: OK, I have Irène, she is 19 years old. But what will she do with her life? Inevitably, boom! She is a student actress who wants to become a great actress, to go to the Conservatoire. It’s true that it plunged me back into nostalgia and memories of myself at that age. It was talking about the most beautiful age, for me, it’s one of the years that were wonderful because we made a dream come true.
In the film, there is this little black box which is the acting class, we go behind the scenes of this acting class to see that it’s craftsmanship and that’s where we had fun the most, by living the passion of the theater.
This film is a breath of fresh air. It is also a response to barbarism and this desire to believe in it.
It’s a look to the future, exactly. And it’s a look to the future that shouldn’t stop a girl on her way to that age. Humanity in the face of barbarism.