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 — a deliberate scale shift, written and shot during the pandemic with a tiny crew on a single forest location outside Paris. Sciamma 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 kind of 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 and a place on its Greatest Films of All Time ballot. It is now widely treated as the film that consolidated Sciamma's standing as one of the most important French directors of her generation, alongside Mia Hansen-Løve and Justine Triet.