The New Yorker Magazine (№ 7th February 2022) by David Remnick (Editor In Chief)

Author:David Remnick (Editor In Chief) [Remnick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: culture, politics, art, jounalism, magazine, non-fiction
Publisher: Conde Nast
Published: 2022-02-07T11:14:49+00:00

Filmmakers, Sciamma says, learn “that conflict is the natural dynamic of the storyteller.” She wants to move beyond that.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL ROUSTEAU

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 7, 2022

41

of Verdun. She was twenty-eight at the toiseshell frames. It was confusing we were looking at a notebook in which outbreak of the Second World War, weather, sunny but somehow drizzling. Sciamma’s grandfather had recorded, during which her village was occupied We moved under an awning.

among other things, the make and model

by the Nazis and the nearby city of Nantes

I had asked Sciamma to bring cer-

of every car he had ever driven, the names

was destroyed by Allied bombs. Carla, tain materials related to her childhood of Snow White’s dwarves, and the ros-meanwhile, had what Sciamma described and her family history. She had brought ter of the soccer team at the stalag where as a “happy, solar” childhood in a newly everything I requested, including child-he was imprisoned during the Second

built Cairo suburb called Heliopolis. hood photographs—even a studio por-World War. It’s not every day, I realized,

(Sciamma’s paternal grandparents grew trait that showed her as a laughing tod-that someone shows you an overabun-

up in the Cairo area and are of Italian dler, with a giant head, wispy hair, and dance of material that you’re actually in-Jewish descent. They moved to France tiny pearl-like teeth. How unguarded terested in. Sciamma’s manner was also in the fifties.) She was the film-lover in she was, in her purple sweater.

unusual, at once relaxed and engaged.

the family, and lived long enough to

“I don’t feel that kid is a stranger,” There wasn’t anything she didn’t answer stream the première of “Petite Maman,” Sciamma said. “I feel close to that per-or offer to think about. At one point, an

at the Berlinale, last March. She died in son. I’m still the same person.” It wasn’t older couple at a nearby table was served May, a week before the release of the hard for her to write about childhood, a gigantic artichoke, and I asked Sciamma theatrical trailer—which includes a scene she said, because no part of that past if it was normal for artichokes to be that of Nelly telling Marion, “I lost my grand-felt irretrievable: “If you tell me, ‘O.K., size in France. “No, it’s huge,” she said, mother last week.”

think about a day in your life when briefly glancing over before facing me

“And now I lost my grandmother you’re six,’ I can really think about a day again, ready for the next question about last week,” Sciamma told me on Zoom, in my life when I was six.” With a lither grandmothers’ floor plans.

lighting a meditative cigarette.

tle focus, she could put her brother at

Sciamma told me about an inter-

the right height, “press play,” and re-

view that she had recorded the previ-

In late June, a few weeks after that member what she ate for breakfast. (A ous year with her grandmother Carla.

conversation, we met at a café across brand of cereal called Country Store.) Her first questions had been about going from the Pompidou Center.

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