Sunday September 18, during the San Sebastian film festival on the Spanish Basque coast, Juliette Binoche took advantage of a prize rewarding her career to invite actresses to refuse the roles of female objects. “You also have to know how to say no to things so as not to be in a kind of system where we see you like that”said the Oscar-winning French actress.
When she was offered roles where she was “someone’s wife, or objectified as a woman”she says she refused them. “I just said ‘no’ because I wasn’t interested”told reporters the 58-year-old actress, admitting that she felt “very lucky” to have played so many interesting roles throughout his career.
“It’s not always easy but you also have to know how to jump into an unknown where you are no longer in macho codes”continued Juliette Binoche, whose role in The English Patient (1996) won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She, who has played some 75 different roles since her big-screen debut in 1983, is trying to “never judging a role, but embracing it with all its contradictions, all its darkness and for what ultimately makes it human”.
The festival, which began its 70th edition on Friday, presented him and Canadian director David Cronenberg with an honorary Donostia award on Sunday evening in recognition of their respective careers. Past recipients of the Donostia Award, the festival’s highest honor, include actors Meryl Streep, Richard Gere, Ian McKellen and Robert De Niro. Last year’s awards went to French actress Marion Cotillard and Hollywood star Johnny Depp.
The San Sebastian festival, which is held each year after those of Cannes, Berlin and Venice, was to be chaired this year by American actress Glenn Close. But the latter announced on Tuesday that she could not come, due to a “family emergency”.
A total of 17 films are in competition for this edition. The official selection mainly includes Latin American and Spanish films, such as “Modelo 77” by Spaniard Alberto Rodriguez, a film about a group of prisoners asking for amnesty after the death of dictator Franco in 1975, which open Friday the festival. Among the feature films in competition in the coastal city of the Basque Country (northern Spain) is a French film: “Le Lycéen”, by Christophe Honoré, with Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lacoste, about a 17-year-old teenager whose life is suddenly shattered.