A few weeks ago I went to a screening of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' at Utopia. I'm not a very introspective person but when I get on that stage, it… - Céline Sciamma

It's a very bourgeois industry. There's resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. "A film can be feminist?" They don't know this concept. They don't read the book. They don't even know about the fact that "male gaze" exists. You can tell it's a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy.

The last scene came really, really early, disconnected from even the idea of a woman painter…I wanted to write a love story and I thought, ‘What do I want to tell?’ And that scene came up really, really quickly, alone, by itself. The weird compass of the film was its last scene. That’s a compass, but it’s a high pressure one.

We want people to have their heart broken and think about themselves, but enjoy this experience of this strong love story...But it’s also about the memory of a love story. It’s a lot about the present, the rise of desire, but it’s also about what’s left of a love story. What’s the memory of a love story. There’s these two timelines that sometimes are contiguous, contaminating one another. We are trying to propose another politic of love where it’s not about possession or donation or eternal love or death or eternity or whatever. It’s more about love as a dynamic that can only grow.