In this collection of interviews "Keeping in Touch," French filmmakers and actors currently in lockdown due to COVID-19 will answer the questions of international journalists for whom French cinema remains a far-reaching voice and vision.
To inaugurate this collection, UniFrance has put director Alice Winocour (Proxima) in touch with the English journalist Demetrios Matheou (Sight & Sound / The Sunday Herald / Metro / The Guardian / The Times).
Demetrios Matheou: Where are you confined?
Alice Winocour : In Paris, at home.
How do you use confinement time, personally and professionally?
Writing. I'm about to finish my new screenplay, which I wrote for an American actress. My life has not changed much because I am naturally confined when I am not filming.
How do you hope that individuals and French society will emerge from this crisis? What lessons learned?
The idea our vulnerability. From our relationship to time, to nature, to others. COVID is like a huge spotlight, highlighting all the problems we face, collectively. I also hope that the feeling of solidarity and brotherhood that manifested during this crisis will continue. Crises are always interesting: it's the tipping point between two states.
With the economic consequences, are you concerned about the future of filmmakers, especially the self-employed? Still hoping to film your screenplay in the not too distant future?
I am hopeful by nature. I am less concerned by the filmmakers than by the invisible ones, delivery men, cashiers, nurses whom this crisis has made visible and the most precarious categories of our societies. In our field, for distributors and theaters it’s a terrible punch.
It is easy to imagine writers, artists, filmmakers actively preparing their responses to the crisis. Do you think there will be a danger of cultural overload of COVID stories? (I think the audience may want to come back to the diversity of stories that cinema normally has to offer?
Sure, but I don't really see the problem. I think that is what is beautiful in cinema, that he can talk about our present, our lives and our pains in a conscious or unconscious way. There will also be films that will not speak directly (realistically) of all of this, but in a roundabout, unconscious manner, and it is perhaps these films that will be the most beautiful, poetic, interesting.
