- Words Are Also Filters: Marjane Satrapi (1969-2026) (June 4, 2026)
In a 2006 interview with The Believer, multi-talented artist and activist Marjane Satrapi said, “nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.” Satrapi built a career using imagery and dark humour to explore the nuances of modern life, often from the lens of the Iranian diaspora.
Born to an upper-middle class family in Rasht, Iran a decade before the 1979 Islamic revolution, Satrapi’s most well-known work is the graphic novel series “Persepolis,” a semi-autobiographical tale of a girl also named Marjane, aka Marji, who was born to an upper-middle class a decade before the 1979 Islamic revolution. Released in the early 2000s, Satrapi adapted the novel into a feature film with her friend and fellow artist Vincent Paronnaud.
Traditionally hand-animated and filmed mostly in black-and-white to mirror the pen-and-ink style of the novel, the film follows Marji as she comes of age—and gets into heavy metal and rock music—during the revolution and the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, eventually finding herself alone in Vienna at the age of 14, where she gets strung out and has visions of God. Returning home, she discovers that she was homesick for a place that no longer exists, and must now find a new place for herself in the world.
Persepolis (2007, France)Directed by Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it tied for the Jury Prize. In her acceptance speech, Satrapi said, “Although this film is universal, I wish to dedicate the prize to all Iranians.” The film went on to be nominated for the Best Animated Feature at the 80th Academy Awards, making Satrapi the first woman nominated in that category since its inception in 2001.
It’s no wonder Satrapi found her voice in both graphic novels and later cinema. Speaking to The Believer about the popularity of her novel around the globe, Satrapi addressed the universality of images, saying:
“Words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there’s a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there’s more efficiency…I always thought the image and the text, writing and imaging, that there is no separation between them.”
Along with the “Persepolis” series, Satrapi wrote a handful of graphic novels, including 2004’s “Chicken With Plums,” about her distant relative Nasser Ali Khan, a musician living in 1950s Tehran who decides one day to stay in bed until he dies. The dramedy, which features a stand-out performance of melancholic brilliance by Mathieu Amalric, is both a personal story about a man whose heart is broken beyond repair, but also an elegy for the lost world of a pre-revolution Iran, one that Satrapi had a taste of as child, though she mostly knew from family lore and photographs. The film debuted at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, opening in the United States the following year.
This was actually my first introduction to the work of Satrapi, whose “Persepolis” I would discover afterward. I was covering my very first film festival—the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival, where “Chicken With Plums” was set to screen with an introduction by Satrapi.
I remember very distinctly seeing her in the window-filled, sun-dappled lobby of the Sundance Kabuki, a group of fans eagerly surrounding her. She was puffing away at a cigarette, looking almost too stereotypically French with a chic black outfit and eyeliner. Someone from the festival was desperately trying to get her to put out the cigarette.
It was an indelible image of confidence and defiance, one that would stick with me every time I thought of Satrapi and her work for years to come.
“THE VOICES”, 2013
Director: Marjane Satrapi,
Dreiundzwanzigste Babelsberg Film GmbH
Over the next fifteen years, Satrapi directed several more films, including “The Voices,” a black comedy psychological horror starring Ryan Reynolds, “Radioactive,” a biopic of Marie Curie starring Rosamund Pike and Anya Taylor-Joy, and “Dear Paris,” a dark comedy starring Monica Bellucci and Rossy de Palma.
Although she only lived eighteen of her fifty-six years in Iran, Satrapi always considered the country her home. In a 2009 essay for The New York Times she wrote, “I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word ‘home’ has only one meaning: Iran.”
One of her last creative projects, the collective work “Woman, Life, Freedom” takes its name from the Kurdish slogan which became a rallying call for feminist activists in Iran after the September 13th 2022 arrest and murder of Mahsa Jina Amini, a young Kurdish-Iranian student whose only crime was not wearing a headscarf. Calling herself the director of the work, Satrapi brought together seventeen Iranian and international comic artists, along with Iranian academics, to craft a work that honored Amini, while also exploring this new generation of protests.
Discussing the work with The Guardian in 2024, Satrapi said of the new youth movement, “I call it a revolution. It’s not a revolt, it’s not a movement, it’s a proper revolution. I’ve said it many times and nobody says the contrary: I think it’s the first really feminist revolution…and it is supported by men.”
Last April, her longtime husband and creative partner Mattias Ripa passed away. This morning news broke that Satrapi had joined him. A statement released from her close friends reads: “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” President Emmanuel Macron of France added that Satrapi’s passing “marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim.”
In her 2024 interview with The Guardian, Satrapi left readers with one last thought, one that I would like to leave with you as well. She said “human nature is made for freedom. With this youth, we might have better days.”
If you are someone you know is in a crisis, you can reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
- Cannes 2026 Video #12: Wrapping Up (June 4, 2026)
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival drew to a close this past May 24th. In this video dispatch, Chaz Ebert reflects on this year’s fest and shares interviews Sonia Evans conducted at Cannes, including World Woman Foundation CEO/founder Rupa Dash, Take2Film’s Julie Sisk, media psychologist Dr. Katherine Woods, and more. Watch the video below.
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is in the rear-view mirror, but we’re still reflecting on the great experience we had, the wonderful films we saw, and the fantastic people we met.
Personally, I always enjoy the Cannes Immersive Competition, which showcases new virtual-reality projects from around the world. This year, the top prize was awarded to the French-produced project, Katabasis.
Prior to the festival, American studio Neon had acquired a large number of competition films, slowing the pace of acquisitions early in the festival. But sales picked up later in the festival with Netflix acquiring the animated film “In Waves.” “Gentle Monster” with Lea Seydoux, and the Spanish breakout film, which shared the best director prize, “The Black Ball.”
Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics was busy acquiring the animated film “Iron Boy” along with “Rehearsals for a Revolution,” the Iranian film that won the “Golden Eye” prize for best documentary in the festival.
Also, “La Gradiva,” winner of the grand prize in the Critics’ Week section, was acquired by distributor 1-2 Special, who are reportedly planning a theatrical release.
More and more, I find that Cannes is about connecting with people, long-time friends and new ones.
Of course, Cannes attracts filmmakers from all over the world. We met with Nancy Paton, a Polish-Australian producer and founder of Desert Rose Films in the United Arab Emirates. Her production company strives to give underrepresented females a voice in front of and behind the camera.
- AMC Turns “Interview With a Vampire” Into the Delicious, Malicious “The Vampire Lestat” (June 4, 2026)
It finally happened. “Interview with the Vampire” has become “The Vampire Lestat.” Season three of the AMC series goes wild with a full transformation into the long-awaited, much-anticipated adaptation of the second book in The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. Books 1 and 2 have seen feature film renditions, but no one knew how to make the wholly villainous Lestat’s heel turn work. It took creator, writer, and showrunner Rolin Jones to envision a storyline that requires the Vampire Himself (Sam Reid) to narrate the events of his pseudo-punk, alternative rock-god era. He’s on tour and on the road to a collision with the Vampire Queen, Akasha (Sheila Atim), but first, he has some emotional baggage to unpack. To paraphrase our complicated protagonist: This is the story of how Lestat woke the Queen of the Damned and unleashed her wrath upon the world.
Wait a moment. Before I attempt to explain the blood-fueled, sensually sardonic madness you’re about to witness, there’s something you must understand. With “The Vampire Chronicles,” Rice has written a series about a toxic, romantically incestuous, overpowered group of immortal “friends” who snipe at each other throughout the centuries while falling desperately in and out of love. And yes, that is the franchise’s charm. Whether on the page or the screen.
Secondly, Jacob Anderson’s Louis is still very much a major player in Lestat’s story, but he has a B-plot (literally called Side B) of his own. Anderson is gravitational, making Reid’s supernova brighter. Thus, more time with Louis is for the better. Now let me tell you how it all goes down.
Lestat and Louis have formed a lovers-to-friends camaraderie until the former learns that Louis confessed their secrets to Daniel (Eric Bogosian), who turned their story into a book. A best-seller that reads more like creative non-fiction than a balanced perspective. It turns out that Louis, but also Daniel, might be unreliable narrators. Friends, Lestat is not the character we met in the first two seasons. That was Louis’ interpretation—both villainized and idealized. From the start of S3, we realize we’re meeting the Vampire Lestat for the first time. While his biographers didn’t lie, they never knew the entire story. Lestat feels attacked, and that’s never good, but he vents his rage by taking over a rock band.
Daniel is making a documentary, following Lestat and his band on a cross-country tour. The first three episodes are as campy as you’d expect from the musings of a self-deprecating narcissist, but the added humor of the mock-rockumentary styling gives an allure that’s “This Is Spinal Tap” mixed with “What if Billy Idol was a vampire?”
The Vampire Lestat (AMC+)
Yet the new POV and campiness aren’t the only reasons “The Vampire Lestat” is a departure from “Interview With the Vampire.” Do not doubt it’s just as depraved, soaked in unceasing obsession, violence, and emotional overkill as before. However, when you reach Ep 4, something deeper emerges from the thrills and the winkingly self-aware humor. The loneliness of being a vampire and the centuries of shameful secrets begin to burn brightly.
That’s when this re-envisioned series really starts to cook. The music takes a turn (for the better), mirroring Lestat’s changing awareness of who he is and what the past has cost him. The confessions and reveals are as rattling as they are gleeful. Most of all, the truth about these vampires emerges to a finer degree. They want desperately to be loved, but love is only meant to last a hundred years or so, and then to persist in absence. That truth is their torture, and it’s what makes “The Vampire Lestat”—the man and show—such a perverse delight.
Throughout the first two seasons, we are meant to believe these vampires are monsters divorced from their humanity. Yet, during the first six episodes of the 7-episode season, we learn that they may be more purely human than we are. Humane? No, but they are overwhelmingly human; every emotion and foible is ratcheted up into overflow. Until everything they feel pours out in unfiltered and frightening forms. It’s not that they’ve lost the sense of what it means to be mortal; it’s that the absence of mortality intensifies every emotion. That’s why they’re uncontrollable beings of lust, love, lechery, cruelty, compassion, and yearning. The funhouse mirrors the series holds up to our humanity, which is what makes “The Vampire Lestat” so compelling, even as it taunts us with our taboos.
The Vampire Lestat (AMC+)
It’s both wicked and charming while remaining unrepentantly dangerous. That’s hard to look away from. As a gothic alt-rock opera caught somewhere between an ’80s that never was and a ’90s that will never be, “The Vampire Lestat” outdoes season 2. The actors seem to have more fun, spinning their characters in new directions. For example, the resentful Daniel or Armand (Assad Zaman). What are we going to do with Armand?
Of course, the history of Louis and Lestat can’t be relitigated without their guilt towards Claudia (Delainey Hayles). We also meet the Vampire Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), who has twists in store for us. This season seethes in its savagery and a spiraling understanding of everything that made Lestat who he is—setting us up for who he will become when the Queen of the Damned rises. Can he evolve into more than “a three-century train wreck”? We’ll see.
Season three of “Interview with the Vampire” is reborn as “The Vampire Lestat,” an eternal playground for the malicious gods of rock and ruin. Get ready for another ride on their mood swings. Big swings, big feels: a bloody good time.
Six episodes screened for review. Premieres June 7th on AMC and AMC+.
- The Woman Who Saved “Star Wars”: Marcia Lucas (1945-2026) (June 3, 2026)
Marcia Lucas died of cancer last week at 80. She’s best known to the general public as the first wife of “Star Wars” creator George Lucas who got $50 million in their 1983 divorce settlement. That’s too bad, because she was a great editor in her own right. She worked not only with her husband on the original “Star Wars” trilogy, but on his 1972 debut “THX-1138” and its follow-up, 1973’s “American Graffiti” (her first Oscar nomination for editing, along with her mentor Verna Fields, who went on to win an Oscar for solo-editing “Jaws”).
She edited Martin Scorsese’s fourth feature, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and he was so pleased with the work that he promoted her to supervising the editing teams on “Taxi Driver” and “New York, New York.” She was assistant editor and a location scout on “The Rain People,” a drama by Francis Ford Coppola, who’d been friends with the Lucases since meeting George on the set of his musical “Finian’s Rainbow.” She was also an assistant editor on 1969’s “Medium Cool,” the directorial debut of the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler.
Winning an Oscar for cutting the original “Star Wars” with Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch is often marked as her career peak, but personally, I’d put “Taxi Driver” alongside it. It mixes multiple film genres together—vigilante thriller, character study, screwball comedy, film noir, and ‘70s style sleaze-pit exploitation, plus a bit of French New Wave-inspired jump-cutting—particularly in the driving sequences and the “You talkin’ to me?” scene, a collage of behavioral bits invented on the set by star Robert De Niro.
Some have made the case that throughout their relationship, which began in 1967 when they met at the University of Southern California film school, Marcia was the secret heart of Lucas’ productions as well as his domestic life, and that after they split up, his movies never recovered the magic they’d once had. There’s a lot of truth to that. Although Lucas is a legendary figure in movie history, mainly for the advances in filmmaking technology that he initiated, he was never considered a “people person.” But his wife was. She was famed for her ability to add humanity to material that might otherwise seem mechanical or theoretical, as well as for figuring out which pieces of the story were guaranteed to make the audience happy.
Mark Hamill told Film Freak Central, “I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little ‘kiss for luck’ before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in [‘Star Wars’].” He said, “’Oh, I don’t like it—people laugh in the previews,’ and she said, ‘George, they’re laughing because it’s so sweet and unexpected.’” She also convinced him to keep the brief bit inside the Death Star when Chewbacca roars at a mouse droid and makes it skitter away in terror, a foolproof laugh-getter that the director had initially deleted because he worried it was too silly.
Although Lucas diminished her “Jedi” contributions by telling a journalist that she mainly worked on “the crying and dying” scenes, Marcia wasn’t just good at the stereotypical “girl stuff.” As a film editor, she was a total package, equally adept at every part of the job. And she had an unerring sense of when to cut out of one storyline and into another, which came in handy on all three of the original “Star Wars” movies. The first cross-cuts between Leia and Luke’s stories before they meet at the Death Star, courtesy of Han Solo’s smuggling ship. The second spends a full hour cross-cutting between the Millennium Falcon fleeing from Darth Vader and Luke traveling to Dagobah to train with Yoda. And the third has a much-imitated ending that jumps between three storylines: Luke confronting Vader and the Emperor in the second Death Star’s throne room; Luke, Leia, Han and the gang down on Endor, trying to disable the Death Star’s shield with help from the Ewoks ; and Lando Calrissian leading the rebel’s fleet’s attack from space.
Marcia Lucas’ majestic architecture in the last act of “Jedi” retroactively makes the entire trilogy more epic, and goes a long way towards convincing viewers that they aren’t just seeing a puffed-up retread of the first movie’s ending. She was the perfect person to supervise that complex sequence, having partnered with her mentor Verna Fields on “American Graffiti,” a nostalgic teen epic that cuts between multiple storylines in the same town on the same night; New York Times film critic Roger Greenspun wrote that the film’s excellence “exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place.”
She told George that the Death Star battle at the end of the first movie lacked tension and said he needed a “ticking clock.” So she created one: the Death Star wasn’t traveling to Yavin to destroy the rebel base in the original script, but Marcia made it seem as if it was. She did it by commissioning new computer graphics showing the Death Star’s position in relation to Yavin; having a voice actor record a disembodied “official” VoiceOver counting down the Empire’s progress toward the rebel base; reusing shots from the destruction of Alderaan sequence that showed Peter Cushing’s bad guy stating, “You may fire when ready” and his minions pressing buttons on the laser cannon’s control board; and timing Luke’s one-in-a-million shot so that it entered the exhaust port mere seconds before the space station’s planet-pulverizing laser cannon was about blast Yavin to pieces. If you watch the sequence closely, you’ll notice that at no point do any of the major characters talk about the Death Star advancing on Yavin. But you feel as if they did, because of the editor’s cleverness.
According to Brian Jay Jones’ book George Lucas: A Life, Marcia told George she wanted to split up in 1982. The third film in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, “Return of the Jedi,” was still in production and racing to meet its Memorial Day weekend 1983 release deadline. George asked if she could wait to announce their divorce until after “Jedi” came out, so bad news about their personal lives wouldn’t detract from the movie’s publicity campaign. She agreed. But even though the Lucases knew that their marriage was functionally over as early as the summer of 1982, they continued to work together on “Jedi.” A 1983 Time Magazine cover story about Lucas, dated three days before the film’s theatrical release, states that the filmmaker has “an apparently blissful marriage [to] a charming, attractive wife,” which ought to tell you how good the couple was at keeping secrets.
By that point, the legal papers were already signed, and although the Time writer announces that George was about to start a two-and-a-half-year sabbatical “to spend time with his wife, play with his daughter, and go to movies,” the sabbatical never happened. George moved out of the family home weeks before the Time story hit newsstands and went back to the workaholic lifestyle that ruined his marriage.
Over the next seven years, he developed and produced ”Howard the Duck,” “Willow,” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” and helped finance his hero Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” and supervised postproduction on the master’s penultimate film “Dreams”—and that’s just a sampler of 1980s Lucas projects, spread across film, TV, and video games. Arguably the only filmmaker of the Baby Boom generation who had so many projects actively in production in the ’80s and ’90s was Lucas’ close friend and Indiana Jones collaborator Steven Spielberg.
Marcia had good reason to want a slower-paced life with more personal time: she’d gotten pregnant before the start of post-production on “Star Wars” and was expected to give birth while cutting “Taxi Driver,” but miscarried, then went on to help finish “Star Wars” and “Taxi Driver” and hurled herself straight into cutting Scorsese’s “New York, New York.” In an interview with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls author Peter Biskind, Marcia said that her inability to have children with George was a source of tension and unhappiness in the marriage, almost as much as his inability to stop working even for a moment. She had more miscarriages with him and gave up trying to conceive.
In 1981, the year Lucas and Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” opened, they adopted a daughter, Amanda. But rather than clear his schedule to get to know her, George threw himself into preproduction on “Return of the Jedi”; put the finishing touches on Industrial Light and Magic, a former division of his production company Lucasfilm that he’d spun into a separate business; and oversaw the creation of the sound quality assurance company THX, not to mention a bushel of other obsessions, in tech as well as storytelling. She didn’t want to go down that road, so that was the beginning of the end of their union.
After leaving the entertainment industry, Marcia seemed content to be an editor in life. She produced just two projects in the ‘90s, one of them a short film, and consulted on other people’s movies, but that was it. She continued to go to theaters and watch films at home, always with a ruthless eye. (After seeing the first “Star Wars” prequel, “The Phantom Menace,” she cried, not because she was moved, but because she thought it was awful.
Audiences were certainly poorer without her. But they were no longer her concern. She mainly wanted peace and happiness for herself and Amanda, who went on to become a professional MMA fighter. The same year she and George divorced, Marcia married Tom Rodrigues, a stained glass artist and painter who had formerly been a production manager at Skywalker Ranch from 1980 to, well, 1983. In 1985, she gave birth to their daughter, Amy. That union lasted ten years. Marcia never married again.
In the book In the Blink of an Eye, legendary editor Walter Murch asserts that after watching a film, “What audiences finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story—it’s how they felt.” Marcia Lucas had an innate understanding of how to accomplish this and proved it in multiple all-time classics.
- Female Filmmakers in Focus: Milagros Mumenthaler on “The Currents” (June 3, 2026)
An exploration of those internal impulses we don’t always understand ourselves and the impact that they can have on our lives, filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler‘s third feature film, “The Currents,” follows Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), an Argentinian designer in the aftermath of a drastic decision. While in Switzerland accepting an award, she flees the ceremony and soon finds herself with the urge to jump into a frozen river. Surviving the fall, she heads back to her home in Buenos Aires with a debilitating fear of water, something she does not share with her husband (Esteban Bigliardi).
Growing increasingly isolated, Lina slowly distances herself from everything she once held dear—her career, her husband, and even her 5-year-old daughter, Sofía (Emma Fayo Duerte). Will she ever find her way back?
Born in Argentina in 1977, Mumenthaler was raised in Switzerland, where her family immigrated during the country’s military dictatorship. Mumenthaler has directed numerous short films and three acclaimed feature films, all of which, in one way or another, explore the intimacy and interiority of women’s lives.
Director Milagros Mumenthaler (credit Kino Lorber)
Her debut feature film, “Back to Stay,” about sisters grieving the loss of the grandmother who raised them, won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2011. Her follow-up feature, “The Idea of a Lake,” explores the fragmentation of memory through the story of a photographer who finds a photograph of her father, which inspires her to revisit his mysterious disappearance during the dictatorship.
Her latest film, “The Currents,” premiered at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival and went on to screen at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival. In her three-star review of the film, Sheila O’Malley writes that “‘The Currents’’s willingness to suggest, rather than show, to create echoes rather than draw verbal conclusions is the film’s main source of power.”
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Mumenthaler over Zoom and via a translator about the image that inspired her film, her exploration of dissociation and of navigating our many selves, her use of music by Gustav Holst, and her making of films that generate questions rather than offering answers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This is such an emotional film, and I wondered what the initial kernel of inspiration was. Was there a question, an emotion, an image, or a feeling that you developed this story from?
At the beginning of this project, there was a picture, an image where I was going along the edge of the Rhône in Geneva, and all of a sudden, I imagined a woman throwing herself into the freezing water. It was an image that stuck with me for some time. It started out as an image that raised many questions about who this woman was, whether she was aware of what she had done, or whether her body had spoken for her.
There’s something very intimate about working so much based on the character herself, putting me in her shoes or in her skin, and trying to be very perceptive and to really see where this condition she’s in takes her. Being actively adrift. I think that turns it into a very sensorial movie where you can really feel what the character sees or hears.
It very much feels like a film that’s trying to represent the feeling of disassociation. Did you research disassociation, or was this more of an intuitive exploration of that process and way of being?
There was a bit of both. There was a formal process in which I worked with a psychoanalyst throughout the filmmaking process, and I also leaned on readings more closely connected to neurology and psychology. But beyond that, I think there is something where, for anyone, the film’s character has a more existential conflict that becomes more evident after the event that puts a life in danger. All of us can ask ourselves, are there other possible lives for us? Can we just split off? Disappear? Or reinvent ourselves?
Those questions are very much at the forefront right now. Lina is clearly someone who asks herself all those questions and even allows herself to physically go through that process. But she also has a very important anchor in her daughter. I think motherhood is what keeps her grounded, what keeps her present, and ultimately leads her to stay.
For her work and her family, she is known as Lina, but with her friend, she is Cata. She is at once two different people. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that character’s attempt to blend those two lives, and whether you think it’s possible for someone to be multiple people at once.
In the film, she is Cata, but Cata refers more to a past life, and Lina refers to her current life. Lina is someone who has moved between social classes. I think that in order to exist, she has to leave Cata behind and transform herself into Lina. So, for me, one of her biggest crises has to do with a sense of belonging, and how she doesn’t really feel like either Cata or Lina. So deep down, the question is, who is she really?
I do think we can all be different people. I think each of us changes depending on where we are and what circles we move around in. Because in all of them, we are perceived differently as well. So, in that dynamic of relationships, we change. You are never the same person within your family because assigned and unassigned roles make us act or speak in certain ways; perhaps in another environment, we become different people with different roles.
We don’t always occupy the same role in every space. We always present ourselves differently, or we always can, and we appear differently as well. And while all of this is going on, inside we’re still another person entirely, and I think the film talks a lot about precisely that tension between the objective outward appearance and the intimate subjective inner self.
The Current (Kino Lorber)
You mentioned her daughter as an anchor for her, but obviously, her mother is another big factor in psychology and is maybe pulling her, like you said, back to her previous life. That tension she has with her mom might be holding her back a bit. Her mother and her daughter are such different anchors, both pulling her in such different directions at the end.
From the very beginning, there is this sense that, in some way, all roads lead back to her mother. When she sees the embroidery, and when she gets lost in that theatre where they’re doing the photoshoot, or later, of the lighthouse as well, when we find ourselves in front of that house without yet knowing what that house is as a viewer. Every path leads to the mother, in a way. Her mother is a bit like the seed of this story, or at least of what Lina is going through. In order for Lina to exist for herself, she had to flee from her mother’s house. When you have a mother who is so fragile and so consumed by her mental illness, there is an abandonment of the people who are near to her.
Lina, in that sense, returns to her mother’s house to seek answers. I don’t think she finds them there, but the place she goes in search of answers ultimately affirms her in her own motherhood and allows her to stay beside her daughter without repeating what her mother did. She differentiates herself. On this note, many times in family relationships, even when we can be very critical of the relationship or family dynamics, those reference points remain, and we involuntarily end up falling into the same behaviors and attitudes as the people we may have critiqued.
I wanted to ask about the use of Gustav Holst’s “Venus, The Bringer of Peace.” It’s such a beautiful, calming piece of music, which contrasts with the very chaotic interiority Lina is going through at this moment. How did you land on that piece of music?
The moments when the “Venus” piece is used for the music, we knew the piece needed to have certain characteristics, and first it had to be something that moves you forward, a theme or a piece that feels like it’s going somewhere. Because some music is more repetitive or more rhythmic, while other pieces carry you toward a destination, so to speak.
It also had to contain a certain fairy-tale-like quality. Lina, in this active drifting state that she’s in throughout the film, has something very playful about her. In the sense of giving herself up to the experience, surrendering herself to the experience, to see what happens. To me, these elements represent Lina’s state very well. There’s tension because she doesn’t know, right? Just as her body suddenly spoke and threw her into the freezing water, she didn’t know what might happen next.
There’s also nostalgia, because I think that Lina is a deeply nostalgic character throughout the film. It’s a representation of how she sees the world. So you feel that nostalgia when she’s looking at the embroidery or watching the woman make the corset. These are all activities that come from a totally different rhythm of life, very different from her work, that chaotic, frantic pace of her everyday life. I think that Lina carries that nostalgia within herself.
Then there is the playful side. She’s not trying to find a concrete answer to the question “Well, what exactly is wrong with me?” She isn’t looking for a definitive diagnosis. She lets herself be carried away, and there’s something playful in that. A kind of “let’s see what happens.” But then there’s also a side of courage to it.
So when we started looking for the music, I had all of those elements in the forefront of my mind. We would start listening to pieces, and we say, “Well, not this one because it doesn’t have that fairytale feeling,” or “Not this one” because it lacks something else. When we heard “Venus” by Gustav Holst, it was perfect. It reflected Lina’s emotional state exactly.
The Current (Kino Lorber)
There are so many different interpretations that you can take from this film, depending on your own perspective on the character, on your own perspective on modern life. Do you have any hopes for what people might take away for their own lives after watching your film?
I don’t know if I’d say I want people to take something specific away, but I do think cinema should be a place for reflection or for carrying something with you afterward. Not necessarily forever, but at least for a little while, leaving you, as a viewer, asking yourself some questions. So that’s the spirit in which I make my films.
My films ask for an active, involved viewer. Not in the sense that they’re demanding something from the audience, but in the sense of leaving space for the viewer to do something with what they’ve seen, instead of giving them every single answer. I don’t want the film to end and for it to simply be “Oh, okay. That’s what it meant. That was the message. That’s it.”
Deep down, we are mysterious people, and there aren’t answers for everything. I like that we have mystery inside ourselves. Mystery has always been part of humanity, and I think it is important to make films that generate questions rather than answers or conclusions.
Are there any filmmakers who are women or films that are made by women that have either inspired you, or that you think are really cool and you think other readers should seek out?
For many years, while working on this film, I made a conscious decision to read women authors. So, in some way, the film and I are defined by the stories women tell. Then, specifically for this project, it was about immersing myself in a world closely connected to how women perceive it through literature.
But there is also an American director that I really like, Kelly Reichardt. I like her way of working, where there is always something almost Chekovian underneath, something quietly happening beneath the surface, but you don’t really know what exactly. She manages to create tension throughout her films like that, and I find that really interesting and fascinating.
