16/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: Thierry de Peretti takes a masterful look at the tumultuous history of Corsican nationalism from the perspective of ruthless innocence, love and friendship

"How do you tell the story of war? Through what channels? Is there an airlock?" After A Violent Life [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], appreciated at the Critics’ Week in 2017, Thierry de Peretti decided to take on the history of Corsican nationalism at the end of the 20th century again with In His Own Image [+see also:
interview: Thierry de Peretti
film profile], unveiled at the 77th Cannes Film Festival Directors' Fortnight. But this time the subtle French filmmaker, who likes to play on the narrative boundary between on-screen and off-screen (because “certain things had to remain hidden”), has chosen a completely different and fascinating point of view, painting a portrait over almost 20 years of a ‘family’ of friendship and love through a romantic prism centred on the trajectory of a young photographer.

"Men have lived, but death came." It all begins with a spectacular car accident, possibly a suicide, and a poignant wake attended by the relatives of the missing woman, the sunny Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo). In voice-over, a narrator (who is not identified until much later in the film) tells the story of the young woman, a long narrative that is also indirectly that of the daily life of a group of pro-independence activists and their companions, their passions, their dilemmas and their heartbreaks. It's a journey back in time that also captures the life of an island, its villages, its sea and its towns, this Corsican soul pierced by a mythology of weapons that drifts into a toxic cult of assassins who end up killing each other in the name of the same cause that is honourable on paper.

Antonia, on the other hand, just likes taking photos, but she's 18 and she's also very much in love with Pascal (Louis Starace) when he embarks, gun in hand, on the Bastelica-Fesch affair in January 1980 (a hostage operation that puts Ajaccio under siege). She becomes the wife of a political prisoner, just like her friends Madeleine (Barbara Sbraggia) and Laetitia (Saveria Giorgi), and over the next few years they are to live a strange existence, with arrests and the radicalisation of the FLNC (Corsican National Liberation Front), the murderous upheavals they witness without ever taking part, and which involve those closest to them: Simon (Marc-Antonu Mozziconacci), Jean-Joseph (Andrea Cossu) and Xavier (Pierre-Jean Straboni). Now a photographer with the Corse Matin agency, Antonia will soon have to choose what kind of life she wants, and how to exist on her own without denying her emotional ties.

Thierry de Peretti interweaves photographs, television archives and magnificent discussion sequences to create a lively mosaic, packed with information (including a symbolically illuminating but slightly less organic diversion into the Balkan war) and visually sophisticated (with Josée Deshaies directing the photography), without ever losing narrative fluidity (based on a screenplay he wrote with Jeanne Aptekman based on a novel by Jérôme Ferrari) or the essential human element. With In His Own Image, the filmmaker has created a remarkably balanced and intelligent film that blends the great and the small of history.

In His Own Image was produced by Les Films Velvet and coproduced by Arte France Cinéma, and sold internationally by Pyramide International.

(Translated from French by Margaux Comte)