Laetitia Colombani adapts her best-seller into a film as a “tribute to the courage of women”

The novelist Laetitia Colombani herself adapts her first novel for the cinema, a bestseller published in 2017, sold 5 million copies.

The braida film adapted from the successful novel by Laetitia Colombani, arrives in theaters on Wednesday, November 29, “tribute to the courage of women” through the intertwined stories of three of them, in India, Italy and Canada.

In India, Smita is a member of the Dalit community (formerly called “untouchables”) who dreams of seeing her daughter escape her miserable condition and enter school. In Italy, Giulia works in her father’s workshop and discovers, when he is hospitalized, that the family business is ruined. In Canada, Sarah, a renowned lawyer, is about to be promoted to head of her firm when she learns that she has cancer. These three women have, without knowing it, a connection.

“Tribute to the courage of women”

“The novel and the film are really a form of homage to the courage of women, even if I wanted them to be able to address everyone because discrimination against women is everyone’s problem “, indicated, during an interview with AFP at the Arte Mare festival in Bastia in October, Laetitia Colombani, author of the novel, co-writer with Sarah Kaminsky and director of the film. This story is “carrying optimism, even if we show sometimes difficult realities, these chains that women wear, particularly visible in India and much more invisible, but very real in Canada”she believes.

The fictional characters, played by the Indian Mia Maelzer, the American Kim Raver (Grey’s Anatomy, New York 911, 24 Hours Chrono) and the Italian Fotini Peluso (the series Greek salad) are “appears fragile” but in reality “fighters”, adds the author of this first novel published in 2017, translated into 40 languages ​​and which has sold more than two million copies in France. As for the little Indian girl who plays Lalita, she is a member of the Dalit community like “all the people you see on screen” in the Indian part, “a street child who begged for food that we met in Delhi”specifies Laetitia Colombani.

“It is also for my daughter that I wanted to carry out this project (…) I very, very much want the world to change, for mentalities to evolve”

Laetitia Colombani

to AFP

She drew her inspiration “in a documentary seen a long time ago on (the television report show) Correspondent who told the story of the hair route in India” and in the journey of one of her friends, Olivia, to whom the film is dedicated, “who fell ill and asked me to accompany her to choose her wig before going to chemotherapy”she remembers.

A “marathon” shoot

“I really wrote the novel telling myself that this story would be impossible to make in the cinema, too expensive, too complicated”specified this writer and filmmaker who had previously directed two films: He Loves Me … He Loves Me Not (2002) and My stars and me (2008). “I was even more surprised, when the novel was published, to receive calls from producers”, she adds. True “marathon”filming took place over six months, “first in India, then in Canada and finally in Italy”. The assembly was also “an important moment to create our braid”she confides.

Today, “I have a novel waiting for me, which I interrupted to go filming”And “I want to continue writing because this freedom is incredible and wonderful.” The novelist is the author of two other novels, The Victorious And The kite, published in 2019 and 2021 by Grasset, which published in September, on the occasion of the release of the film The journey of La Tresse, an illustrated logbook of the film.