Ursula Meier – Ursula Meier’s retrospective #BFM41

PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Ursula Meier, director of the film Ursula Meier’s retrospective.

Bergamo Film Meeting reconnaissance of contemporary European cinema on its 41st edition will focus on the works of Ursula Meier (France – Switzerland) – which straddle the thin borderline between fiction and documentary – masterfully analyse the profound ambivalence of emotional ties. These are the words through which the Festival has described the French director. Ursula Meier comments on the homage to her work the 41st Bergamo Film Meeting has organized and talks about the fil rouge that connect all her films, from Home (2008) to the latest one, La Ligne.

Ursula Meier’s retrospective: Ursula Meier is a director and screenwriter. She often navigates the thin borderline between fiction and documentary, analysing with great skill the profound ambivalence of emotional ties. Growing up in eastern France, near the Swiss border, she studied film and television production in Belgium at the IAD – Institut des Arts de Diffusion and began working as an assistant to Alain Tanner in the second half of the 1990s. Her diploma film, Le Songe d’Isaac, and the subsequent Des Heures sans sommeil (1998), won the special jury prize at the Festival international du court métrage de Clermont-Ferrand and the International Grand Prix at the Toronto Film Festival, and allowed her to devote herself to cinema full time. In 2001, she directed the short film Tous à table – about a group of friends who meet at a special birthday dinner – which won the audience award at Clermont-Ferrand. After two documentaries, Autour de Pinget (2000) – a tribute to the work of the writer Robert Pinget – and Pas les flics, pas les noirs, pas les blancs (2002) – on the extraordinary story of Alain Devegney, deputy sergeant of the Geneva gendarmerie – she directed Des épaules solides (2003), produced for the ARTE series “Masculin-Féminin/Petite Caméra”, achieving great success with the public and a nomination for the Swiss Film Prize. The film tells the story of Sabine, a talented young athlete who wants to pursue a professional sports career and pushes her body to extreme limits. Her first feature film was Home, starring Isabelle Huppert, in 2008, in which she recounts the vicissitudes of a family living in a remote cottage near a closed motorway, which, to their surprise and concern, is about to be reopened, with all the unpleasant consequences imaginable. The film was presented during the International Critics’ Week at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and received a nomination for the 2009 César Awards in the Best First Feature category and was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Production Design. In 2012, with L’Enfant d’en haut (Sister), the story of siblings Simon and Louise, she received a special mention for the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and represented Switzerland in the nominations for the 2013 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; she also received a nomination at the 2013 Lumière Awards for Best Francophone Film and one at the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2014, she was among the 13 directors who created the collective film The Bridges of Sarajevo, shot on the occasion of the WWI 100th anniversary and presented at the Cannes Film Festival; her segment, Tišina Mujo, takes place during a football practice in the Zetra stadium, where little Mujo misses a penalty kick by sending the ball over the fence. She then made Kacey Mottet Klein, Naissance d’un acteur (2015), a short film which documents the physical and professional growth of the young actor starring in her two previous films, and Ondes de choc – journal de ma tête (2018), a feature film with Fanny Ardant, in which a young man kills his parents after sending his secret diary to his French teacher. La ligne (The invisible line, 2022), the story of three sisters, a mother and a forced distance, is Meier’s latest work presented in competition at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival starring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. The film recounts the dynamics of an atypical family, in which it’s space that defines affections and relationships.

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