Plus filmmaker Q&A

A rare chance to see the short films of French auteur, Lucile Hadzihalilovic - from her mid ’90s mini-feature La Bouche De Jean-Pierre aka Mimi to her more recent short Nectar, she remains both controversial and challenging, tacking issues of teenage sexuality while developing a distinct visual identity.

Jonathan Romney, The Guardian, 2016:
Hadžihalilovic grew up in Morocco, where her father – the surname is Bosnian – had moved from Yugoslavia. Aged 12, she started reading a lot of science fiction, notably Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon and then discovered horror writer HP Lovecraft, whose fascination with all things tentacular and aquatic is unmistakably imprinted on Evolution(2016). Moving to France at 17, she studied art history, before graduating from the Paris film school La Fémis.
In current French cinema, Hadžihalilović is pretty much out on her own limb with her commitment to the textures of the imagination. “Sometimes when you dream, the images are neutral, but they have a real emotional charge that doesn’t seem to fit,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to capture. When I start a film, I never really know what it’s about, and I want to find out – to explore that zone of mystery.”
She started making films (with Gasper Noé) as a duo: He shot her debut mini-feature, La Bouche de JeanPierre, AKA Mimi (1996), and she edited and produced his early works Carne and I Stand Alone. They work separately these days, but Hadžihalilović was involved in the development of Gasper Noé’s trippy afterlife drama Enter the Void – “a script that took a really long time to write, even though people think it didn’t have a script at all”.