Petite Maman

Céline Sciamma's Petite Maman followed Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the film that had made her an international name two years earlier. Where Portrait ran for two hours and twelve minutes, Petite Maman is seventy-two minutes long. The drop in scale was deliberate: she wrote and shot it during the pandemic with a tiny crew on a single forest location outside Paris, and has described it as the smallest film she could imagine.

The two leads, Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz, are real twins making their screen debut. Sciamma cast them together so the central encounter could rest on a physical resemblance no makeup department could fake. Cinematography is by Claire Mathon, who had shot Portrait and would go on to Spencer; the score is by Para One, Sciamma's regular composer. Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne, both established stage actors, play the parents.

The film premiered in competition at Berlin in 2021, in a curtailed online edition of the festival, and went on to land on dozens of critics' top-ten lists for 2022, including the Sight & Sound year-end poll, as well as a place on its Greatest Films of All Time ballot. For us it confirmed Sciamma as one of the most important French directors of her generation, in the company of Mia Hansen-Løve and Justine Triet.