In the endless stream of theatrical releases, some films are gifted with you surpriseto take you where you’ve never been and to get you out of the room grow.
Among his own script rightly edifying (Emmanuelle Nicot wrote it in four years), a staging as sublime as it is intelligent and ethics AND actors we forget perform comedyDalva is the revelation of a great director and a great (young) actress.
If we could give you only one piece of advice it would be not to miss it for the world. Dalvaand to go there without any a priori, because the film is experienced as a sensory, political and feminist experience comparable to no other.
To help you dive a little deeper in a job that will accompany you for a long time after the screening, we met the director Emmanuelle Nicot.
With a livelinessintelligence, mastery of his art it’s a rare empathytold us about the relationship with the world of children affected by the flubut above all the way he wanted to show with a overwhelming benevolence their path to emancipation.
Dalva, what is it about?
Dalva is 12 years old but dresses, makes up and sees herself as a woman.
One evening, she is suddenly taken away from her father’s house.
At first revolted and in total incomprehension, she will meet Jayden, an educator, and other children placed in a halfway house.
A new life then seems to be offered to Dalva, that of a young girl her own age.
Meeting with the director Emmanuelle Nicot
To miss. Can you tell us about the genesis of Dalva? How did you get the desire to make this film?
Emmanuel Nico. Several elements led me to meet Dalva. It was there before the topic of flu, which is quite personal to me and that I’ve needed to explore since I started making films. I think that’s why I make films. After my two short films already talking about flu, I needed to explore this question in parent-child relationships because I think it is one of the more complicated holds to get rid of.
Then there’s a pretty basic dive that I did an emergency center for teenagers in northern France. I met 11-18 year olds who had just been placed. What struck me about these children was how completely they were still under their parents’ control..
They suffered much more from being placed than from what they had actually experienced. I was faced with the denial of a power that I could not have imagined. I told myself there was a film to be made at this precise moment of placement, right at the beginning.
More precisely, how was the character of Dalva born?
I started interviewing social workers, educators, shrinks, judges… Then a story came to my ears: that of an educator who went to pick up the children at home when there were suspicion of abuse. One day he was contacted for a six-year-old girl who lived alone with her father. And he came across a little girl who was extremely sensual, gender and who was there a game of seduction relating to.
That’s all I know about this story, but I wanted to tell the story of this twelve-year-old boyat the age of first emotions, at the age of puberty, a adolescence…and this is how, slowly, Dalva was born.
Leave plenty of room for the point of view of Dalva. ORn understand her, we feel her sensitivity… but at the same time, her world is built on denial and lies. The point of view of educators corrects this point of view. How did you think about the question of point of view?
What interested me from the very beginning of writing was be from the point of view of Dalva, who is a victim who absolutely does not see himself as such. The whole point of the film is how are we going to have empathy for this little girl who has a completely distorted view of the world and who is so far from ours.
In my staging, everything is set up so that we never get away from what he feels.
I wanted to start the film during the arrest because it’s a moment of total chaos. Dalva and us, we are completely in the dark. We don’t know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Everything gradually clears up. The challenge is that we understand what Dalva was a victim of, but she doesn’t understand it. So we had to hold on to her.
In my staging, everything is set up so that he never catches what he feels. With my chief operator, we wondered every time where to put the camera to be closer, emotionally, to what Dalva is going through. That’s how we said rejection throughout the first part of the film, with these children at home who have no faces, these educators who are always vague, distant. And as the movie goes on, they begin to exist. There are more and more of them external…
In fact Dalva realigns itself with our gaze. This aspect is somewhat correct.
Your film talks a lot about love. It evokes it in multiple and sometimes contradictory forms. There is in particular filial love, friendship, romantic love, lack of love…
Imagine that for a while the film was called Love according to Dalva. In the end, we held Dalva because we found the first title a bit pompous. But yes, she speaks completely of love: I even think it’s also about the love between a father and his daughter.
To me, it’s not that Dalva doesn’t like her, it’s that she’s very, very unloved.
This is also the question of all foster children. They are children torn from their families, not because they are not loved, but because they are a very unloved, extremely toxic and destructive love.
And when I talk about love according to Dalva it’s because the movie is a whole relearning of love from Dalva, who will find out what it’s like to love for nothing. I think of the forms of love she will develop, in particular the friendship with the other children in the house, with her educator… Unrequited forms of love.
Why did you choose to represent the school space, which introduces new themes, when you could have imagined a film set only in the foyer, for example?
Among the children placed, I was able to observe this this awareness it also comes from dating completely different people. These boys are ten thousand leagues from what Dalva has been through. They are “everyman” and yet, it is their gaze that will participate in making them notice what happened to them. And this is also how you get out of denial.
Despite the great hardness of their lives, the children of the house are not absolutely never judge Dalva. There is a big one candy Between them. While at school, where there are those children whose life is so much more smooth, this hardness is carried by the gaze. I wanted to compare Dalva with this violence that comes from a place where you don’t expect it and with this sweetness that comes from another place where you don’t even expect it.
At 12, your lead actress Zelda Samson is extraordinarily talented. How did you find out?
For a living, I do wild castings, which means I’ve worked with non-professionals. This baggage helped me a lot to find Dalva because me I knew exactly what I was looking for and where to find it.
I was looking for a young girl who came from a fairly well-off social background, who had a certain command of language, who head carriage of a dancer and ageless. I placed advertisements in equestrian centers, gymnastics schools, ballet schools, theater and music academies, because I knew they were pretty middle-class, even easy-going, girls.
Between France and Belgium, we have received 5000 questionson which I selected 300 profiles. I asked these girls to send me a short video presentation.
This is how I ended up with Zelda who, at 11, explained to me with incredible aplomb and a vocabulary not at all her age, that she wanted to be an astrophysicist, a dark matter specialist, who considered herself a Nobel Prize winner. She was very feminist and very critical of the kids in her class.
When I met her, Zelda was obviously much more introverted than in the video. But when I turned on the camera, she had, as Romy Schneider, this strange face that makes it 10 years in front, 20 years in profilewithout bluffwithout makeup… Her face is magnetic and changes age.
We were just on the second day of casting, but I quickly realized that I didn’t need to search anymore: Dalva, it was her.
First rankthis is the gossip-free chronicle of Maya Boukella, a pop culture journalist at to missin which he advises you THE movies to see at the cinema this week. A weekly appointment to bring to light the nuggets of the big screen, showcasing only the best of the films and releases of the week.
Source: Madmoizelle
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
