OUR BODY (NOTRE CORPS)

The French director Claire Simon was making a film about a Paris hospital when she found out she had cancer. So she became a character in her own film. “I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon says in a recent interview. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. This changed my point of view entirely; it helped me cope and be calm in the face of my own sickness.” Simon assembles intimate patient-doctor consultations and surgical procedures into something like a volume of short stories, with a clear sense that there’s been a dialog between the filmmaker and the subject.. She observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward and in the process, she questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity and beauty of patients in all stages of life. Through these many encounters, the specific fears, desires and struggles of these individuals become the health challenges we all face, even the filmmaker herself. One of France’s premier nonfiction filmmakers, Claire Simon’s work as a writer, director, and cinematographer is rooted in the “direct cinema” teachings of the Ateliers Varan, a documentary training program founded by Jean Rouch. ~OY