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Parisian film director's new film is a love letter to her wounded city

Alice Winocour tells of her inherited Jewish trauma and her new film on the 2015 Paris terror attacks

August 3, 2023 15:23
Aalice Winocour 2A0Y7K1
4 min read

Alice Winocour says she has an innate understanding of trauma. “My grandfather survived Auschwitz,” she explains when we meet in Paris during the Unifrance get-together of French filmmaking talent.

There is no doubt that trauma and post-trauma has been baked into a career that began with a bang over a decade ago with the well-liked period drama Augustine, which explored the story of French neurologist Dr Jean-Martin Charcot as he examines the source of a kitchen maid’s violent fits.

“The women who were hysterical in the 19th century had been raped,” she explains. “And their bodies were expressing [their pain], like a rebellion, as it was impossible for them to revolt with words.”

Winocour followed the drama with the 2015 film Disorder, which starred Matthias Schoenaerts as an ex-soldier suffering from PTSD. Four years later, she directed Eva Green in the astronaut tale Proxima.

And now she’s back with Paris Memories, which explores the trauma suffered by the mind and body during and after a terrorist attack.

Her inspiration was her younger brother, Jeremie, who was present at the Bataclan theatre on November 13, 2015, when three armed gunmen opened fire on concert-goers, killing 90 of them. It was one of a series of co-ordinated terror attacks across the French capital.

The shellshock of the night, the exchange of frantic texts with her brother, scarred her. “After Proxima, I came back to Paris, and I thought, I really have to make a film about my wounded city.

“Until then, I had never shot any films in Paris, which is strange because it’s really my city.”

The result, she says, “is a love letter to Paris” and a film that addresses the aftermath of terror and which mostly passes over the bloodshed of the moment.

There’s also no mention of the Bataclan. Instead, the story sees Mia, a radio translator played by Virginie Efira, caught up in an attack in a bistro.

Three months later she is still trying to piece together her memories of the night, when she returns to the venue and meets other survivors. Some have crystal-clear recall; others, like her, suffer from amnesia.

“The character is not in real life anymore,” says Winocour. “She’s in her city, but she doesn’t recognise it as such, she’s in limbo.