The memory is perpetuated from one generation to another. Besides, Hearts valiant, of Mona Achache, echoes her family history. This film, which follows the journey of Jewish children under the Occupation, hunted down, on the run, resurrects a whole range of feelings that were transmitted to him.
“This film responded to a very old desire, specifies the French filmmaker. To find intimately the man who had helped my Jewish grandmother when she was a hidden child. There were then 60,000 in France. And I wanted to tell this journey which took a carefree look at a period that was hardly carefree. My grandmother could evoke to me at the same time the mourning, the fear and this lightness of an adventure of freedom, specific to childhood which poses on very dark episodes a necessarily subjective look. But the story on the screen is fictional. “The screenplay, she wrote it with Valérie Zenatti, Christophe Offenstein, Jean Cottin and Anne Berest, moving away from the story of her grandmother. The title refers to children’s magazines Valiant Hearts that the hidden children discover and appreciate in the film.
She had made in 2014 The gazelles, comedy of manners about a band of girls on release. For Valiant Hearts, she was inspired by the scenario of figures of the Resistance and those who protected the works of art against the greed of the occupier. The curator of the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, Rose Valland, heroine of the shadow army, sent several treasures from the collections to the provinces, to the Château de Chambord, in particular.
In the film, six young Jewish children hidden in the boxes of a truck find asylum in this fairy-tale castle before being saved by a courageous and rigid woman, Rose (Camille Cottin), who drags them to the side of the freedom by sacrificing themselves after an odyssey in the forest.
Chambord is at the heart of the film, because the Cher river, in the surroundings, straddled the demarcation line between the free zone and the occupied zone until 1942, a hub for trafficking and escapes. “It was a space where French people and Jews rubbed shoulders. »
Obtaining authorizations to shoot at the castle was a process of building trust. “Everything was born out of dialogue,” says Mona Achache. We promised to be respectful, to film there with a small crew. They opened the doors of this mythical place to us, where boxes were still stored in a room. The adventure we were telling mingled with theirs. I knew the history of the Shoah, but I discovered that of Chambord, with this castle which bears in it all the periods of the history of France. »
Gradual discovery
Above all, Mona Achache wanted to talk about children in the face of death, by offering them an initiatory journey, where death, love, play, fear mingled with a feeling of extreme freedom. Finding young performers has become more complex in a context of confinement. “The children weren’t able to meet before filming and got used to each other gradually. We adapted to their personalities. They told each other and we injected their reality into the film, which was shot chronologically. It allowed us to be placed at the height of a child. They imbued their characters with the energy of the present. In one scene, when they make fun of one of their classmates, one of them starts crying. The emotion that erupted was right. We kept it. »
For the character of Rose, Mona Achache, who had already staged the actress in The gazelles, has only good words for his interpreter Camille Cottin. “She has such a listening ear and such an ability to bounce back. We were inspired a little by the figure of Mary Poppins for the roughness of her character who feeds on everything that children bring her. He had to both keep a distance and forge links. »
The filmmaker and her cinematographer, Ísarr Eiríksson, wanted to give the film a warmth, marrying bodies, stones and nature, often using a handheld camera to follow each child and adding poetry to the chaos. on a still classic staging. Because Valiant Hearts is not a dark film, despite its theme, rather a hymn to childhood that would find wonder in a minefield.
Valiant Hearts will be on display
in theaters May 27.