At the cinema - The epic tale of female bodies in the hospital

2023-10-02 16:09:30

Claire Simon’s documentary entitled “Our body” will be released in cinemas on October 4. A journey of desires, fears, struggles and unique stories that each woman experiences alone. Especially since one day, the filmmaker had to move to the other side of the camera in the middle of filming.

IVG, endometriosis, PMA, maternity, gender transition, cancer… filmmaker Claire Simon sets the scene in the department of a Parisian hospital, a predominantly female department where the destinies of women intersect. “ Even if I think it’s very clear, I really want to clarify that this is not a film about the hospital but about the patients, and their bodies. It seems to me that this reverses the usual relationship, where we focus more on the institution. When discovering the rushes, even if the caregivers were not denied – that was in no way the intention – it was a pleasure to see that the film is always on the side of the patients » recalls Claire Simon during an interview given to Arnaud Hée in January 2023.

“Filming women’s bodies in their beauty, their materiality, their singularity…”

And to continue: “ It’s not easy to film the body in the hospital, because it is largely hidden during operations and childbirth. So I wanted to go frankly in terms of representation: breasts, acts of palpation of flesh, bellies, skin. It was almost a matter of siding with the sculpture. But I don’t feel like I did it brutally, but, on the contrary, with as much love as possible. If the female body is hidden, pain is almost impossible to find. I felt like I was stalking her.«

“What struck me a lot is that the body is a kind of chaos, and during any operation – with a scalpel, laparoscopy, with a robot – the doctors do anatomy, they never stop naming, it’s fascinating. I always felt like I was in the presence of the Enlightenment! »

When “her” cancer was announced, in the middle of filming, the filmmaker was “overwhelmed”. “ I think it shows! I heard what I didn’t want to hear, what was waiting for me and what I didn’t want to admit. This is the moment when I completely rejoin, through illness, the community that I am filming. I was already a member as a woman, but here I share the destiny of a patient. This is why it seemed essential to me to be filmed naked, as I have done for others. It’s also a way of avoiding the overlooking position that I can grant myself as a filmmaker. It is important to see others, the fact of not being a woman alone facing questions about her body, her confrontation with doctors, with the hospital institution, but to know that there are others , that there is a community, that it is large, strong« .

And to conclude: « I would not like people to consider that the film gives an idea of what constitutes a feminine existence: it is about the passage through the hospital, which I do not confuse with life as a whole. Unlike general pathologies, when you break a leg or when you have cancer such as lung cancer, all the ailments here involve love, desire, sex life, feelings, self-image. That is to say deep, lasting effects, when they are not definitive.«