ABSTRACT
Bande de Filles is merely the latest of Céline Sciamma’s portrayals of adolescence, which share a focus on vulnerability, the body, and affect. Released in 2007, Water Lilies portrays the relationship between two teenage girls. Centred around a synchronised swimming team, Sciamma foregrounds the abject lurking beneath the girls’ performances of femininity. In turn, Tomboy depicts an androgynous child, Laure, who decides, seemingly on impulse, to go by the name Mickaël when she arrives in a new neighbourhood. Completing the set, My Life as a Courgette, whose screenplay was written by Sciamma, conveys the vulnerability and interconnectedness of the young residents of a Parisian children’s home. Sciamma’s career to date has seen the director take an unusually prolonged focus on adolescence as a state of indeterminacy. Her work sits between auteurist art cinema and genre-led teen movie traditions, making her films uniquely placed to move between their French context and resonances beyond those frontiers. Sciamma’s career has undeniably been shaped by her training at the elite filmmaking academy La Fémis, from whose screenwriting programme she graduated, as well as the French film industry’s institutional prioritisation of youth.
