Paris (AFP)

Céline Sciamma, back in theaters on Wednesday with "Petite Maman", has been exploring female identities for the past fifteen years.

And has become one of the standard bearers of combat feminism, in cinema and beyond.

Three years of #MeToo whirlwind in the cinema, questions of gender or consent that become central ... "I have the feeling of living a moment that I was not even considering", testifies the director of 42 years to AFP.

This "revolution in our civilizational journey", the native of Cergy-Pontoise (Val d'Oise), a former student of the Fémis, has been dedicated to it for several years.

She is involved in all the fights: to the 50/50 collective for equality, with a media rise of the steps in Cannes in 2018, by 82 women, to denounce their marginalization, to the Society of Film Directors, among the signatories of the forum which will lead to the profound renewal of the Caesars ...

At the end of April, she was also in the first big lesbian march for 40 years, alongside activists like Alice Coffin or the actress Adèle Haenel, a very close one, whom she revealed on the screen, of which she was the companion and who broke the omerta on sexual violence in French cinema.

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Blue-green eyes, blond hair, this director with heavy but sharp words also fights against police violence, alongside singer Camélia Jordana, director Ladj Ly or actress Aïssa Maïga ...

- "Contrary tensions" -

"We are at the heart of a great moment of progress, awareness and collective diagnosis", notes Céline Sciamma, whose "Little Mum" was selected at the Berlinale and who knows that her fights meet with "resistance to the measurement of beautiful impulses ".

Where does it get its energy from?

"Awareness of oppressions, our revolts and our greatest anger come from very far away", including from childhood, an age of which it keeps "the vitality".

And that she has filmed several times: in "Petite Maman" but also in 2014 in "Tomboy", the story of a little girl who wants to be a boy, who will earn her the wrath of the fundamentalist Catholic association Civitas.

Because Céline Sciamma, who denounced in 2020 in The Guardian the conservatism "bourgeois" of French cinema, is first and foremost an admired director, who claims to involve actresses and spectators in an "experience".

His aura greatly exceeds the figures at the box office tricolor (around 300,000 spectators in the room for the last three).

Her "Portrait of the young girl on fire" received international acclaim and became one of the two French films to exceed one million viewers in 2020 since their release (1.47 million) ... just ahead "J'accuse" by Roman Polanski, whose feminists keep reminding us that he is accused of rape.

This love story between a woman to be married in the 18th century in Brittany (Adèle Haenel), and the painter who came to do her portrait (Noémie Merlant), has definitely registered her as a director who matters.

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The film, awarded the screenplay in 2019 at Cannes, has become a benchmark for "female gaze" in cinema, described as a "revolutionary gesture" by specialist Iris Brey for its way of showing a desire "without domination".

The "Portrait" "represented an earthquake" in France, where there "had been nothing comparable", according to the lesbian activist and presenter of Arte Marie Labory.

It was supported by the filmmaker Xavier Beauvois when he left La Fémis that this literary graduate, reader of Annie Ernaux and admirer of David Lynch, carried out her graduation project.

It will be "Birth of the octopuses" (2007, Louis-Delluc prize), a film which propels her, as well as Adèle Haenel, by recounting the discovery of homosexuality in adolescence.

In 2014, she will devote "Bande de filles" to "the construction of the feminine identity" and to the "assignments" experienced by black teenage girls in the suburbs.

Céline Sciamma has also written for others.

André Téchiné, of which she was co-screenwriter for "When we have seventeen years" (2016), will say to have found in her a "call towards emancipation", "something which made that one did not leave weighed down, that the cinema kept its enchanted character ".

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