Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

RECTOR(S): Céline Sciamma   COUNTRY: France   YEAR: 2019   LANGUAGE(S): French, Italian   SUBTITLES: German   RUNNING TIME: 120 min

SECTION: Previews at Cinecittà 2019

SCREENINGS

Monday, 07.10., 8.00 pm, Cinecittà

SYNOPSIS

In PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, the director Céline Sciamma tells the tale of a love affair between a painter and her model in the late 18th century. The images she uses could themselves be paintings. Sciamma puts the female gaze in the foreground, creating a powerful picture of lesbian desire and depicting the situation of women at the time. The multi-faceted screenplay was awarded a prize at Cannes.

France, 1770. The Paris-based painter Marianne travels to a remote island in Brittany. She has been commissioned to paint the portrait of the young lady Héloïse, who has just left a convent school and is due to be married. She refuses to sit for the portrait because she does not want to marry. Marianne spends the days with Héloïse, observing her and painting her from memory in the evening. An irresistible attraction slowly grows from the penetrating glances between them …

CÉLINE SCIAMMA

Céline Sciammia was born in Pontoise in 1978. She studied French literature at the University of Paris/Nanterre and film with a focus on screenwriting at the filmschool La Fémis. Her first feature-length film, Water Lilies, which Sciammia wrote the script for herself, premiered in 2007 and the Festival de Cannes chose it for the section Un Certain Regard. Her new film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire was shown in the competition of the Cannes Film Festival and won an Award for Best Script.

FILMOGRAPHY

Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011), Girlhood (2014), Being Seventeen (2016), My Life as a Courgette(2016, Drehbuch), Portrait of a Young Lady in Flames (2019)

SCRIPT: Céline Sciamma   PRODUCER: Bénédicte Couvreur, Véronique Cayla   CAMERA: Claire Mathon   EDITOR: Julien Lacheray   MUSIC: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Arthur Simonini   CAST: Noémie Merlant, Adéle Haenel , Valeria Golino, Luana Bajrami

PRODUCTION: Bénédicte Couvreur, Véronique Cayla, Lilies Films, ARTE France, Hold Up Films   WORLD SALES: MK2 S.A   GERMAN DISTRIBUTOR: Alamode Film