Director Jacques Audiard on the Dilemma in Cinema

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For his ninth feature, Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades, Paris 13e, 2021), director Jacques Audiard collaborates with French filmmakers Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius to adapt American cartoonist and illustrator Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, Killing and Dying (2015).

Shot in monochrome, the story centres on Émilie (Lucie Zhang), Camille (Makita Samba), and Nora (Noémie Merlant), whose lives intertwine through friendship, sex, and love. Émilie and Camille’s apartment is seemingly picked at random from Paris’ populated 13th District. In what feels like an act of voyeurism, the audience is implicit a participant in prying into their exposed emotions and naked flesh.

Émilie and Camille are introduced as lovers. She lies naked on the sofa before he joins her. Text appears on screen to take us back in time to reveal how this all began. We’re yet to meet Nora, who is forced to abandon her future plans when she’s mistaken for cam girl Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth).

Paris, 13th District is about disparate lives converging, a recurring and subtle theme across diverse spaces in Audiard’s filmography. While his newest work is a modest entry amidst films that have garnered critical praise, amongst them: A Prophet (Une Prophète, 2009), Rust and Bone (De rouille et d’os, 2012), and Dheepan (2015), it continues an ongoing thematic conversation. Our lives are integrated, and this interaction is a catalyst for joy and tragedy, hope and despair, contentment and frustration.

In conversation with PopMatters, Audiard discusses how cinema’s status as a popular art form, and its loss of function and purpose to cultivate cultural and social identity, has created an existential dilemma.

Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you?

The cinema was the only way to express my creativity; it’s the way I’m able to communicate with the world.

I was a…

Read the full article HERE

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