DIRECTOR: Céline Sciamma
PRODUCER: Bénédicte Couvreur
PRODUCTION CO: Lilies Films
SCREENPLAY: Céline Sciamma
PHOTOGRAPHY: Claire Mathon
EDITOR: Julien Lacheray
MUSIC: Para One
WITH: Joséphine Sanz (Nelly), Gabrielle Sanz (Marion), Stéphane Varupenne (Father), Nina Meurisse (Mother), Margo Abascal (Grandmother)

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FESTIVALS: Berlin, Toronto

REVIEW

“Movies tend to paint childhood in primary colors, mistaking small people for small interior worlds. But French auteur Céline Sciamma — who for years has centered her stories on young girls awakening to themselves in arthouse hits including Water Lilies, Tomboy, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire — doesn't do them that disservice in Petite Maman, a tiny thunderbolt of a film (it's only 72 minutes long).

Dragged along by her distracted, grieving mother (Nina Meurisse) to clear out the remote country house of her recently deceased grandmother, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) eventually goes looking for her own entertainment outside. In the woods one day she meets Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), also eager to play — maybe because she looks, from the curls in her hair to the tip of her nose, like Nelly's mirror image.

It would ruin the delicate mechanisms of the plot to say much more, except that Sciamma's elegant, melancholy fable captures something lovely and ineffable: a brief glimpse into life's great mystery.”

– Leah Blatt, Entertainment Weekly

“Céline Sciamma’s luminous Petite Maman is a once-upon-a-time tale with a twist. Set in present-day France, in an isolated hamlet made for solitude and imagination, it is a story about family ties, childhood reveries and unanswerable questions. It’s also a story about finding someone who, like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle — the piece you knew existed but just needed you to find it — completes the picture. Put differently, it is a story about love.”

– Manohla Dargis, NY Times

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Timaru
Tuesday, 04 February, 6.30pm

Whanganui   
Monday, 24 February, 7.00pm

​Tauranga  
Wednesday, 05 March, 6.00pm Luxe Tauranga

Nelson 
Wednesday, 26 March, 6.00pm

​Dunedin 
Wednesday,09 April, 7.30pm​

​Hamilton
Monday, 28 April, 6.30pm

Auckland  
Tuesday, 03 June, 6.15pm

Palmerston North
Wednesday, 25 June, 6.00pm

Bigger Picture Ōamaru
Thursday, 17 July, 7.00pm

Queenstown 
Tuesday, 12 August, 8.00pm

Westport
Wednesday, 10 September, 7.00pm

​Canterbury  
Monday, 06 October, 7.00pm

Carterton
Friday, 28 November, 7.00pm
Celebrate CONTEMPORARY CINEMA  >>