Throughout her career Catherine Breillat has been an uncompromising voice in filmmaking. At this year’s festival she was a recipient of the Maverick Lifetime Achievement Award and there was a screening of three of her films. Tina Bernik looks more closely at the often controversial subject matters in her films and talked to the director herself.
The Maverick Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at the Cinehill International Film Festival, is given to filmmakers who have demonstrated artistic audacity, swum against the current, and expanded the boundaries of cinematic expression. French director Catherine Breillat, this year’s recipient of the award alongside Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, epitomizes everything this prize stands for.
Her rejection of conventional directing methods and often uncomfortable depictions of sexuality and interpersonal dynamics have placed her at the forefront of the New French Extremity, a movement otherwise dominated by male directors – with the exception of Claire Denis.
Breillat is also widely considered one of the boldest filmmakers, regardless of gender, when it comes to exploring sexuality and intimacy on screen. From the very beginning, her portrayals of female desire have provoked strong public reactions. Her debut film, A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille, 1976), based on her own novel “Le soupirail”, follows the sexual awakening of a teenage girl through a mix of fantasy and reality. Due to its explicit content, the film was banned for decades and wasn’t screened in cinemas until a quarter of a century after its completion.
A Real Young Girl was one of three Breillat films screened at the Cinehill festival. Audiences also had the chance to see her best-known work, Fat Girl (À ma sœur!, 2001), a summer coming-of-age story about two sisters, in which Breillat once again unapologetically explores girlhood, sexuality, and the discomfort it evokes. The third film presented was Romance (Romance, 1999), her sixth of thirteen directed works.
In Romance, Breillat collaborated for the first time with Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi, who also starred in her later film Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004). Though the stories differ, both films delve deeply into themes of bodily experience, intimacy, and desire.
In Romance, Caroline Ducey, then in her early twenties, plays a young schoolteacher named Marie, whose partner denies her sexual intimacy, prompting her to embark on a series of encounters to explore her own body. In Anatomy of Hell, Amira Casar, then in her early thirties, portrays an unnamed woman who, following a suicide attempt, hires a man to observe her body and behavior over four nights.
Both roles were physically and emotionally demanding, and Breillat encountered conflict with both actresses due to the films’ explicit scenes. Casar, though eager to be in the film, refused to participate in unsimulated sex scenes, so Breillat – determined to keep her in the role – used a body double and edited the material digitally. And Ducey later claimed she had not been aware of the explicit nature of certain scenes, a claim Breillat firmly denies.
Both films remain controversial even today, and reactions to their content might be even more negative in our current era of heightened political correctness, caution, and prudishness. For that very reason, the exploration of intimacy in cinema became a central topic of my conversation with Breillat at Cinehill.
At 77, the director has retained the same courage and intellectual vitality she exhibited decades ago. In our discussion, she emphasized that “…art is sometimes brutal, art sometimes hurts, just like life,” adding that film should not preach virtue, but rather reveal truth – even if that truth is ugly.
“If you play a rape scene, that doesn’t mean you’ve been raped. And if a director writes such a scene, it doesn’t mean they’re a rapist. But today, we’ve gone so far that any scene involving sexuality is automatically suspicious. Every director is suspect,” she said.
“In the past, actors performed extremely difficult scenes without intimacy coordinators, without contracts, because they trusted the art form. Today, actors aren’t afraid of the scenes themselves, but of the consequences. Not stage fright from acting, but anxiety over potential scandal. What we’re seeing now is a moral panic. Scenes are labeled ‘violent’ just because they include sexuality or physical contact. But film isn’t reality, film is a representation. And that representation has to be strong enough to provoke an emotional response,” she emphasized.
According to Breillat, some now want to protect audiences from their own emotions, from the possibility of being shaken.
“But film has to shake us—otherwise it has no meaning. And that’s suffocating. For actors, for directors, for everyone. We’re under surveillance. And surveillance is always the enemy of creativity,” she added, being particularly critical of intimacy coordinators, whom she described not as saviors, but as a symptom of censorship. “They solve nothing – they introduce a new form of control, disguised as ethics. What they are doing is an attempt to sterilize artistic expression. They want to make it harmless, controlled, subordinate to ideology. And all of it in the name of some predetermined morality – which is not the same for everyone. Film is not a moral tale. Film is not a fable. Film must provoke, challenge, disturb. It must confront us with our own desires, doubts, and fears.”
Tina Bernik
Edited by Steven Yates
© FIPRESCI 2025