Paris (AFP)

When a little girl becomes the childhood friend of her own mother: with "Petite Maman", in competition in Berlin, the French director Céline Sciamma offers a dreamlike and puzzling time travel, conducive to family introspection.

The film is, with "Albatros" by Xavier Beauvois, one of the two French productions in the running for the Golden Bear on Friday, among 15 films in total.

It tells the story of an eight-year-old girl, Nelly, who loses her grandmother.

After a last farewell at the retirement home, she leaves with her parents to empty the grandmother's house, nestled in the woods.

The mother leaves.

Nelly remains alone with her father, and goes to explore the forest.

Near a cabin built at the foot of a tree by her mother child, she meets a little girl, named Marion ... like her mother, and who becomes her "little mother".

- Round trips -

During 1:12, the film plays with these temporal back and forths: little Nelly befriending her mother who has become little again, inventing stories, cooking pancakes or running in the woods.

Filmmaker acclaimed in 2019 after the release of "Portait de la jeune fille en feu", with Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, prize for best screenplay in Cannes, Céline Sciamma has deepened the questions of gender and sexual identity, as in the "Birth of octopuses" (2007) or "Tomboy" (2011), as well as those of adolescence ("Bande de filles", 2014) and childhood.

"Petite Maman" plays on a more intimate register, and very dreamlike, leaving a very large place of interpretation to the spectator and to the magic.

The film "is an experience abolishing the past, the present and the ages", explained the filmmaker during the presentation of the film during the festival online.

"My characters are not the heroes of my films, but they are the spectators. I want to leave room for the experience, the emotional journey, for your own story".

Far from "Back to the Future" productions, "it is not a question of a tourist trip through time, but of an opportunity to share space and time together, a time journey with a very intimate objective" , she explained.

“Meeting your parents, but children, it's almost a secret fantasy, and I hope it will become (a fantasy) collective” with this film, she added.

- Twin sisters -

Shot for the exterior scenes in places where the director grew up, and for the interior scenes in a house recreated in the studio to give a "totally timeless" atmosphere, the film is carried by her two young actresses, two twin sisters, Gabrielle and Joséphine Sanz, who lend themselves naturally to the game of cinema.

To blur the lines between eras, Céline Sciamma dressed them in clothes found on the Internet, after scrutinizing class photos from the 1950s to today, establishing a catalog of the most timeless fashion pieces of the last decades.

"I do not make a portrait of a child, I have no particular connection with them, I am not a child in my head", insists Céline Sciamma, who believes that children must be considered as people to fully-fledged, "going through the same crises as all of us".

And the film, matured before the coronavirus crisis, and shot after the end of the first confinement in France in the summer of 2020, can now find an even more "urgent" meaning: "This film is made to stay in your head (. ..) that he can console you, and that he gives you imagination ", hopes the filmmaker.

She says she thought it so that children can see it with their parents, even their grandparents.

© 2021 AFP