Céline Sciamma left a modern masterpiece to the history of cinema with the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire and gained a huge fan base with her unique cinematic language. Her new movie, Petite Maman, which was eagerly awaited in the past weeks, was also released. We wanted to frame Céline Sciamma, who appeared before the audience again on the occasion of this film, for you today.
One of the best French screenwriters and film directors to emerge in recent years, Céline Sciamma was born on November 12, 1978 and grew up in Cergy-Pontoise, a suburb outside Paris. Her father, Dominique Sciamma, a director at the Strate School of Design, is a software designer, and her brother, Laurent Sciamma, is a stand-up artist and graphic designer.
Céline Sciamma, who stated that she was a very enthusiastic and good reader as a child, even though she did not have a family environment or social background that would guide her artistically, was also introduced to cinema in her youth. Growing up in the 1980s, when clever blockbusters from masters such as John Hughes, Robert Zemekis, and Steven Spielberg were popular, Sciamma was greatly influenced by the films and directors he watched.
Falling in love with cinema at a young age, Sciamma began going to her town’s art house theater three times a week, where she became interested in reading movie scripts and biographies of filmmakers. She studied literature before attending the French film school La Fémis, because she wanted to learn a craft and feel legitimate while at the same time delving into the essence of the concept of fiction. Those years were tough times for her as he felt like he was battling against everybody while studying literature with four hundred other people who all wanted to write and were competing with each other.
Céline Sciamma, who thinks that being young means being alone and struggling with yourself, but on the other hand, defending the idea that everything can be changed like her father, who does not take anything lightly in her life, is the final project of her cinema education at the National Image and Sound Trades School (La Fémis), which she went to after high school by winning the auditions. She wrote his first original screenplay, Naissance des pieuvres, as part of The Birth of Octopuses.
During her education, she formed long-lasting friendships with Rebecca Zlotowski (director of Planetarium) and Marie Amachoukeli (director of Party Girl). Xavier Beauvois, who was the chairman of the evaluation committee at the time, persuaded Céline Sciamma to make a film, although he had no such thing in mind. A year after graduating from school, she stepped into the world of cinema with the movie he started shooting in her hometown, and everything progressed very quickly for her after this movie.
A bold and modern look
Thinking that cinema is about building a universe and playing between the real and the unreal, Céline Sciamma continues to work as a screenwriter for other directors while directing her own films in the world of cinema.
Age 17 (Quand on a 17 ans, 2016) and The Life of the Pumpkin (Ma vie de Courgette, 2016) stand out among the films he wrote the scripts for. While writing a screenplay, although it does not sound like a very professional work discipline, she prefers to think for a while and then write it all; this discipline may not suit everyone but it seems to work for him.
Céline Sciamma moves so resolutely and steadily that her sensibility and sensuality mingle with gender politics with an incredibly bold and modern perspective wins hearts. Sciamma considers David Lynch a major influence, in addition to citing Virginia Woolf as “the greatest novelist” and Chantal Akerman as “one of the most important filmmakers”. She also loves the cinematic language of Gus van Sant and Larry Clark because of their stylized forms and the fact that they have their own universes even though they look real.
An activist organizer
In 2014, Adèle Haenel publicly admitted to having an affair with Sciamma in her César Award acceptance speech. The two met on the set of the 2007 movie Water Lilies and started dating after a while. However, the couple parted ways amicably some time before the 2018 filming of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, starring Adèle Haenel.
A feminist herself, Céline Sciamma was a founding member of the French branch of the 5050 by 2020 movement, a group of French film industry professionals advocating gender equality in films. In 2018, she organized and participated in a women’s protest against inequality at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, along with many notable women, including Agnès Varda, Ava DuVernay, Cate Blanchett and Léa Seydoux.
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