Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

SCREENINGS

Monday, 07.10., 8.00 pm, Cinecittà

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. Their looks gradually develop into an irresistible

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

WEBSITE