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CBC
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
'I wanted to make an October crisis film meets Alice in Wonderland'
The Quebec director of the animated film Death Does Not Exist, brings it to Cannes Death Does Not Exist director Félix Dufour-Laperrière is grappling with an existential crisis that many of us looking out in the world today will find relatable. The Quebec filmmaker says he holds onto the "very strong social democratic beliefs" that defined him when he was "young and very intense." But today he's a father of two, and, for the sake of self-preservation, can't be as outspoken about his ideals when looking out at a world that is becoming violently inhospitable to so many different communities. "I first and foremost, want to protect my kids," says Dufour-Laperrière, on a Zoom call with CBC Arts. "But I wish that they lived in a livable world that is open to all." This nagging contradiction, or "paradox" as Dufour-Laperrière refers to it, is at the heart of the Archipelago director's latest feature premiering in the Director's Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday. The hand-drawn animation, in which colours painted on paper lend rich texture to the lush and often abstract digital landscapes, follows a young activist named Hélène confronts the same existential dilemmas haunting the filmmaker — albeit in a much more "intense and romantic way" as Dufour-Laperrière puts it. His film is about French-Canadian radicals willing to take violent action. Hélène is part of an armed collective who target an obscenely wealthy elderly couple at their fortified mansion. During a chaotic shootout with their target's security detail, Hélène backs out, leaving her comrades to die and instead embarks on a dreamy, soul-searching journey. She's haunted by her friends and her targets, alongside a little child and an older woman, all challenging her to consider the consequences of her actions and inactions, weighing the comfortable but meaningless life she could lead as the world crumbles around her or the way she will alienate everyone close to her in pursuit of a higher but costly ideal. "The film is about two impossibilities," says Dufour-Laperrière, "the impossibility of violence first and foremost but also the impossibility of the status quo. Once you put violence in the world you don't control the consequences. And yet how can you live when the status quo is not possible. It's a tragic tale about two impossibilities meeting." Death Does Not Exist doesn't address any specific political, social or global conflicts we're living through today, a narrative choice perhaps stemming from the very cautiousness the film is confronting. Though the question Dufour-Laperrière asks, through his characters, throughout the film can easily be posed to any of the most pertinent calamities today, especially since the abstract imagery is suggestive of so much: wealth inequality, food insecurity, the climate crisis and armed conflict are all there. The project actually began with a real historical reference point. "I wanted to make an October crisis film meets Alice in Wonderland in contemporary Quebec," says Dufour-Laperrière, referencing the violent 1970s conflict when militant separatists in Quebec kidnapped a British trade commissioner and murdered Quebec minister Pierre Laporte. Those incidents pushed then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act, allowing for a military occupation and mass arrests. The October Crisis was the subject in Gilles Groulx's critical and confrontational documentary 24 heures ou plus. Dufour-Laperrière counts that film as an aesthetic and thematic influence, alongside Groulx's political coming-of-age drama The Cat in the Bag. He even cast Barbara Ulrich, who starred as seductive and restless young Montrealer in The Cat in the Bag, as the elderly wealthy woman confronting the young radical Hélène in Death Does Not Exist, achieving a circularity that's both eerie and poignant. For Dufour-Laperrière, invoking Canada's past is a way of reminding that radical violent action isn't a foreign concept. "Violence is happening everywhere in a lot of countries," he says, "and we're surprised in the Western world when it emerges." "I wanted to reflect on these issues, this radicality, but in modern days with a different crisis — social but ecological too — and mix it with a fantastic side that in my eyes illustrates the interior life of the characters." Image | DEATH DOES NOT EXIST Publicity Materials/9_LMNP_Enfant_fleurs.png Caption: A still from Death Does Not Exist (Félix Dufour-Laperrière) Open Image in New Tab At this point, I ask Dufour-Laperrière to consider the whole Cannes apparatus and its contradictions. The festival is hosting films that are touching on some of the most urgent crises of our time. They opened with "Ukraine Day," premiering three titles (Zelensky, Notre Guerre and 2000 Meters to Andriivka) about the war that has been raging for three years. They're also premiering Once Upon a Time in Gaza, a dark comedy about two brothers selling drugs out of a falafel shop in 2007; Yes, Israeli director Nadav Lapid's critical satire about a musician trying to compose a new national anthem after October 7; and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a documentary about the lives lost to Israeli offensives in Gaza. The last one arrives in Cannes mired by a tragedy not originally contained in the film. Its main subject, 25-year-old photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, was killed along with 10 members of her family in an Israeli airstrike, just days after announcing her film will premiere at Cannes. While the festivals host these films, it also warns attendees attending to not make any political statements or wear such symbols on the red carpets and events. The stark opposition between Cannes trying to reflect and engage with the world at large in its programming while maintaining a comfortable, cozy and risk-averse decorum is at the heart of what Death Does Not Exist is about. "It's paradoxical being in a peaceful country," says Dufour-Laperrière. "I don't bear direct involvement in it. But there are some people that are directly touched — them and their families — with what's going on in the world. And I guess they should be necessarily allowed to express their concerns. And these concerns are often, as you say, quite tragic. "It's an impossible balance to find between the two. You can be moderate. But if the world isn't moderate, what are we going to do? Reality is unbearable for a lot of people."
France 24
29-04-2025
- General
- France 24
‘Unwavering friendship': The true story of nine women who escaped a Nazi death march
'It wasn't until she told me, one day over lunch, that I realised she was a war hero.' Gwen Strauss' great-aunt, Hélène Podliasky, was one of nine women who used their wits and courage to escape a Nazi death march and find the Americans in the spring of 1945, as World War II was drawing to an end. Seven of the nine were in the French Resistance and two were in the Dutch Resistance. They were all arrested in France and deported to Ravensbrück, Hitler's concentration camp for women. April 30 marks 80 years since Ravensbrück was liberated by the Soviets. 'In my family, we always talked about Daniel, Hélène's husband, and all the things he'd done,' Strauss recalls. Daniel Bénédite was a well-known Resistance fighter who had helped save artists like Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Hannah Arendt. 'But Hélène didn't talk about her story, and neither did we,' says Strauss. This was typical not only within the families of women who had been deported, but also in society in general. After the war ended, the women lucky enough to have survived the concentration camps rarely talked about what had happened to them. 'She wanted to tell me' But Strauss knew Hélène had an extraordinary story, and so, a few weeks after their lunch, she recorded her great-aunt's account. Ten years later, in 2012, Hélène, who was in her nineties, died peacefully after a short illness. 'She wanted to tell me, because she knew it would be forgotten otherwise,' says Strauss. She did not immediately start writing about Hélène's escape from Nazi Germany. 'I let it sit, and I regret that,' she says. 'Because if I had started sooner, I might have been able to interview more of the women. By the time I started to really investigate the story, all of them had died.' In 2017, appalled by the white supremacist riots in Charlottesvile, Virginia, Strauss decided the time had come to revisit Hélène's story of resistance and resilience and write "The Nine: How a Band of Daring Resistance Women Escaped from Nazi Germany" (Manilla). 'I saw her name on these Nazi lists, and it was real' An archivist in Leipzig tracked down documents which showed Hélène's name, because she had spent time there at a forced labour camp. 'That was really a gut punch. I saw her name on these Nazi lists, and it was real,' says Strauss. But tracking down the other eight members of the group was not easy, in part because they had nicknames and noms de guerre. Click here to watch our documentary By sheer chance, some years earlier, she had come across a book, "Neuf filles qui ne voulaient pas mourir" (Nine girls who didn't want to die, Arléa), in a Parisian book shop. 'It was just sitting there on the table.' The author, Suzanne Maudet, known as Zaza, was one of the nine and had been very close to Hélène. She contacted Zaza's nephew, because he was the one who had got her book published and his name was in the preface. 'I went to see him in Rennes, with my daughter,' Strauss recalls. 'That was an incredible interview, an incredible day talking with him, because I discovered how traumatic the whole thing was for Zaza.' The death march In Zaza's book, she describes the nine's escape in an almost light-hearted tone. 'It's really happy, positive and optimistic. There are so few allusions to the fact that they were coming from a concentration camp and all that had happened to them before getting to that point.' Strauss knew the real story was far darker. The women had been forced to labour in factories for the German army. They had survived months living in appalling conditions in concentration camps infested with disease, lice and without enough food or water. They were surrounded by violent SS guards and torture was common. The Ravensbrück Memorial estimates that 28,000 of the 120,000 women of more than 20 nationalities who passed through Ravensbrück did not survive. When the Nazis realised the Allies were drawing closer, they forced many prisoners on what became known as death marches, because up to a quarter of the prisoners died along the way. In mid-April 1945, the nine managed to escape from their death march when they were near Oschatz. They were just in time: 'The ones who didn't run away ended up being executed in a field two or three days later,' says Strauss. 'That would have been their fate too'. The escape From Zaza's book and the archives in Leipzig, Strauss began piecing together the story of the nine. She got in touch with Dutch filmmakers who had made a documentary featuring a reunion between Hélène and Madelon Verstijnen (Lon), one of the two Dutch members of the group. She met with more family members from different parts of France, and was able to read accounts some of the women had written which had stayed within their families. She learnt that they had escaped from the death march during a moment of chaos when the guards weren't looking. They hid in a ditch, pretending to be dead. This worked, because there were corpses on the roadside. They then walked from village to village in what was still Nazi Germany. Hélène used her impressive language skills with the locals. At one police station, she managed to acquire a hand-drawn map on headed paper, which they were able to use as a laissez-passer during their ten-day escape journey. The women finally found the Americans in Colditz on April 21, 1945, after crossing the frontline, which involved a perilous traverse of a fast-moving river. 'No longer marriageable' The women who returned after being deported found, very quickly, that they couldn't talk freely about what had happened to them. Most people simply couldn't understand what they were saying, the horror they had endured seemed unthinkable. 'There was also this idea of 'Let's not dwell on the darkness, we're trying to build a new world now.' All those stories were so gloomy, and people didn't want to hear them. And also, nobody could understand them except for fellow survivors,' says the author. Women who returned after being deported also faced stigma. Marriages were called off. 'There was this idea that if you had been a young woman in the Resistance and then deported and survived, you must have prostituted yourself in some way to survive. You must have been raped. You were no longer pure and so no longer marriageable.' In "The Nine", Strauss explores the lives the women went on to lead. Some married fellow Resistance members, like Zaza and Hélène. Others, like Joséphine Bordanava (Josée), never told their families they had been in the camps. The survivors arrived in France in spring and summer 1945, but Paris had been liberated since August the year before. 'And then these women came with their shaved heads and their emaciated bodies, and it was so shameful and awful for them,' says Strauss. That explains why the tone of Zaza's book comes across almost light-hearted. She had written it in 1946, a year after the war had ended. 'I think that was the attitude that women who had been in the camps and in the Resistance had adopted. It really comes through in the writing.' 'Unwavering friendship' Instead of 'dwelling in the darkness', Zaza's account focused on the deep bonds the nine developed during their journey. As Strauss continued researching, she brought to light a story of unwavering friendship. They had several close shaves during their escape, attracting attention for being a large group of women. But splitting up was not an option. They encouraged each other, shared what little they had and physically supported members of the group who were ill and suffering. Josée, who had the most beautiful voice, would soothe the group by singing for them. 'To me, that was really the beautiful part of the story that I kept discovering;' says Strauss. 'The women really did help each other out again and again. And that helped them survive. To me, that's an important lesson.'
Times
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Times
French PM's daughter reveals ‘assault by priest' at school
The daughter of the French prime minister has claimed she was assaulted at a school where widespread abuse is reported to have taken place that her father is accused of ignoring during his time as education minister. François Bayrou's eldest daughter, Hélène, now 53, made the claim in a book to be published on Thursday. He learnt of the book only on Tuesday, when she told him that she had given Paris-Match an interview about it, according to French media. Ms Bayrou said that she did not tell her father at the time about the violence she suffered as a pupil in the 1980s at Notre-Dame de Bétharram, a private Catholic school in the Pyrenees. Her mother, Élisabeth, taught religion there in the 1990s. The
Associated Press
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Art PR Agency JPR Media Group works with Hélène de Beauvoir exhibition at Amar Gallery
London, UK - 18 March, 2025 - Top Art PR agency JPR Media Group delivers art press coverage for the Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed exhibition at Amar Gallery. Amar Gallery's exhibition Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed, is the first ever solo exhibition of Hélène de Beauvoir's work in London. Often overshadowed by her older sister, the writer Simone de Beauvoir, this exhibition features paintings & works on paper from the 1950s to 1980s. Amar Gallery's founder, Amar Singh, was recently described by The Telegraph as a 'farsighted art dealer' for consistently discovering overlooked artists and being the first gallerist to show the work of Lynne Drexler in London. The Woman Destroyed is an exhibition which took Singh three years to put together, sourcing works from around the world, meeting patrons of de Beauvoir and discovering how important Hélène de Beauvoir was to her sister and the global feminist movement. Editor Annalisa Tacoli notes Picasso was an admirer of Hélène's paintings. Picasso became familiar with de Beauvoir's work when the artist had her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1936 at Galerie Jacques Bonjean, a gallery cofounded by Christian Dior, who began his career as an art dealer before becoming a fashion powerhouse. Galerie Bonjean also exhibited the work of Picasso, Braque, Dali and much like Hélène even gave Leonor Fini her first solo exhibition. In Tout compte fait (1972), one of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical works, she wrote collaborating with Hélène was something she had long wished for. In 1967 one and forty-three first edition copies of Simone de Beauvoir's The Woman Destroyed were published by Gallimard with sixteen etchings by Hélène. First editions of this book are extremely rare, and one copy is on view at Amar Gallery. This incredibly important book in feminist ideology was the first time the de Beauvoir sisters collaborated together. Publisher Gallimard was afraid that the publication of such 'feminine' 3 literature would give it the mark of a publisher intent on overturning the social order. The main themes covered in Simone de Beauvoir's The Woman Destroyed are echoed in the individual memoirs of the de Beauvoir sisters, with particular regard to their mother's confined domestic life in their family home in the rue de Rennes, Paris, and Simone's later experience as the second woman in her relationship with philosopher, novelist and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre. Referring to her sister, Hélène wrote, 'I was her first reader…and I would draw' in her book Souvenirs, where she recalls how, in the early years, she came to choose the vocation of artist, whilst her elder sister preferred to write. In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel prize in literature which he rejected as he did not wish to be 'transformed' by such an award. After rejecting the award Sartre tried to escape the media by hiding in the house of Hélène in Goxwiller, Alsace. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir remained close with Hélène, regularly attending her exhibitions and immersing her with their electric circle including Cocteau, and Lionel de Roulet, whom Hélène married. Claudine Monteil, former French diplomat and women's rights specialist, presented a special talk at Amar Gallery about her relationship with both Simone and Hélène de Beauvoir. Claudine details in her book The Beauvoir Sisters, that the two sisters shared a close bond and artistic influence on one another, but also about the jealousy and rivalry. Monteil also highlights how these two remarkable women came together to help launch the modern women's movement and make a mark on the world. HÉLÈNE DE BEAUVOUR IN SELECTED COLLECTIONS & MUSEUMS Centre Pompidou Uffizi Museum Florence Oxford University Musée Würth France Erstein The royal library of the Netherlands JPR Media Group JPR Media Group secured top art press coverage in UK, France, and USA newspapers and magazines in both print and online. Media Contact Company Name: JPR Media Group Ltd Contact Person: Jessica Patterson Email: Send Email Phone: 07950977765 Address:14th Floor 33 Cavendish Square City: London State: Greater London Country: United Kingdom
