Luis Martínez Berlin
Berlin
Updated Monday, February 19, 2024-17:58
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The words were there. You just had to find them. This has been, very briefly, the driving force of the literature of
Christine Angot
(Châteauroux, 1959) since in 1999 she surprised the world with the punctual description of the indescribable. The book
Her Incest
told in the first person how her father raped her when she was 13 years old. This text was followed by
A Week's Vacation
,
An Impossible Love
and, more recently,
Journey to the East
. In all of them, in an always disturbing and always controversial way, she returned to the scene of the crime.
Images of the unimaginable were missing and those have just appeared at the
Berlinale
in the form of the disturbing and brutal documentary
Une famille
, where the author, now director, gives the floor to each of the members of her family: from her daughter to her mother through her stepmother or her ex-husband. “The problem,” says Angot, “is considering incest a personal problem. No, it's everyone's problem. It's from society.
Why have I made a film? And why wouldn't I do it? Do you have to ask for permission?
». Pause. «With this the same thing happens as with what I have always experienced. Some come up to me and say: 'I believe you.' They say it as if they were doing me a favor. What's supposed to be done next? Give the thanks? No, the problem is not one of permissions or beliefs, the problem is incest," she concludes.
Berlinale
Berlinale.
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Editor: LUIS MARTÍNEZ Berlin
Gael García Bernal: "Spain has to learn to recognize itself as mestizo"
Berlinale.
Kristen Stewart slaps and saves Godard
Editor: LUIS MARTÍNEZ Berlin
Kristen Stewart slaps and saves Godard
The movie slams open the door. And it's not a metaphor. The team formed by
Caroline Champetier
, as cameraman, and she breaks into the house of her stepmother, who lived without problems of conscience and convinced of her respectability with a father who raped her daughter. “There was nothing planned,” she explains. «It was on the presentation tour for my last book when not so much the idea as the need arose. When my stepmother opens the door to her house and we force our way in, what we do is introduce the public to the reality of a problem that always happens behind closed doors, in the most absolute silence or even complicity," she reasons.
The film progresses and one by one all the closest witnesses of
Angot
's life reason about how they faced the insurmountable. And little by little, words emerge and from their hand the images. Clear and hard words and images. In fact, both were there. We had to find them. «It is not about giving another version, because incest is just that. There are no ways to contemplate it », she continues. At one point in the film one of the interviewees uses the expression "a girl raped by a man" to refer to what happened. And the director herself corrects: "
He is not a man, he is your father, who is supposed to live to protect you
." The incest taboo exists precisely to guarantee that care. When the one who rapes you is your father, what he really does is not recognize you as a daughter.
The documentary recovers some of the interviews that Angot directly underwent when he presented his book. «They summoned me to television sets and sat me next to an expert. They asked me and, immediately afterwards, the expert was invited to tell what had happened to me.
"I never allowed myself to cry in front of the camera, I did it as soon as it came out of the shot
," she recalls, at the same time testifying that things have changed. "Society is beginning to understand the mechanisms of power," she says. For now, the unnameable and the unimaginable already has a name. And face.