Elsa Amiel

The collaboration between Amiel and Finkiel is not a recent thing. In parallel to her acting work Amiel has developed a strong career as an assistant director, for films including La Chose Publique, by Mathieu Amalric and Cache Cache, by Yves Caumon. She assisted Finkiel on his previous feature, Les Européens, before working on Nulle Part, Terre Promise. She is also moving into directing her own films: in 2007 she wrote and directed her debut short film Faccia d’Angelo, about an old and forgotten boxer dealing with his personal memories. Several of these films were produced by the Paris-based independent production company Les Films du Poisson, for which Amiel works.

Theatre and cinema have always been a part of her life, since an early age. “You spend all of your life watching other people’s films and then one day you suddenly feel that you have to make your own work. This kind of thing can’t be explained, it is just like this”, she claims. “There is passion, there is the art work and then, there is the necessity. I can’t work without giving myself fully. I don’t know any other way”. In Nulle Part, Terre Promise, the crew never knew what they were doing, but as they all trusted so deeply in the director, they did it anyway.

Amiel also has very strong feelings about the place of art in the cinema industry:“Our cinema has a resistance position nowadays”, she says, referring to the recent works she has been involved in. She believes films like Nulle Part, Terre Promise are constructed much more during their making than during the scriptwriting phase. Or, as she defines it, “We shoot the phenomena”. She also compares it with the cinemas of Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rozier for its freedom, giving part of the credit to the digital equipment that allows film crews to be much lighter than in the past. “But there’s still a lot of learning to be done in this field”, she believes. “We can shoot more. But then, we have to write more. To be able to shoot lighter and with more freedom is no reason to shoot just anything”. Being in this milieu for a long time has given Amiel some experience: “Sometimes we hear people say it has always been this way. But this is not true. Digital cinema is here to show us that things can change”.

And for the future, what can we expect from Elsa Amiel? Well, she is going to assist Mathieu Amalric once again in his new feature, Tournée, to be shot very soon; direct a medium feature next winter in Budapest; and is currently writing the screenplay for her first feature. As for acting, she says that she is ready to be carried away again at any time, with only one condition: “As long as there is passion!”

Joao Candido Zacharias