Alice Winocour and her Sewing The cast challenged an unusual wet time in San Sebastian Sunday evening for the European first of their new film, a backdrop drama by the glamorous frenzy of Fashion Week.
The French-written director, known for his award-winning scenario César Award Mustang as well as Eva Green with Proxima (2019) and Memories of Paris (2022) directed by Virginie Efira, returns to the Spanish film festival with even more power. Angelina Jolie anchors Sewing As Maxine, a 40 -year -old American director responsible for doing a short job for a show by Paris Fashion Week. In the middle of the sequin of the most chaotic week of the fashion year, Maxine is diagnosed with breast cancer.
The film, which has had its world premiere at Tiff and which is now participating in the main selection of San Sebastian, examines how Maxine’s life believes itself with two other women: ADA, a young model from South Sudan (Anyer Anei) who escapes a difficult future only to find himself in a more frivolous environment, and Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a French makeup artist who dreams of being a writer. Louis Garrel embodies the director of photography of Maxine, with whom she undertakes a relationship.
On Sunday, during the film’s press conference, Jolie was emotional discussing her family history of cancer, a disease that took the life of her mother and grandmother. The actress had a preventive double mastectomy in 2013. She told journalists: “I chose to have it because I lost my mother and my grandmother very young, and I have the BRCA1 gene.”
She continued: “These are my choices. I’m not saying that everyone should do this in this way, but it’s important to have a choice. As Alice said, it unites not only for women, of course, but whoever experienced something [similar]. “”
The Hollywood Reporter Cell with Winocour before the first of the film to discuss the reason why this functionality is not at all fashion, but women and their trauma, or what Winocour calls “stitches”. The director explains his decision to make a film around the crossing of fashion and medicine, the double means of the title of the film and the formation of a close friendship with the pretty Oscar winner.
I would like to know how you arrived at this intersection of fashion and medicine, and why it was a mature material for you.
I think all of my films come from very personal and intimate stories that I project into a very distant and unknown world. I didn’t know anything about fashion, but I got to know Maxime Walker’s trip. This trip is really the starting point. It happens that I live in a district which is the district of the fashion week and one day, I left the hospital, and I found myself in the middle of the crowded entrance of a fashion show, in the middle of the glitter, the lightness of this world. And when you leave the hospital, you need one thing: to connect to life, to the life that involves.
In the crowd, I looked at the models, the photographers. I suddenly felt linked to someone who was also from another world, a southern girl that I saw who seemed lost in the streets [of Paris]. This is what the film is talking about, sharing stitches – how you can connect with people who come from very different worlds.
You mention these seams together and the stories of Angelina. She fought with family history of breast cancer, like her character Maxine. Was the role written for her?
At the beginning, I wrote the story from my own point of view. I knew that Angelina could be interested and embody the game because she had an operation to escape this family fate. So, from the start, it was a special link between her and me, certainly. In addition, I think we did something with our stitches, both. Part of all the DNA of my work as a director is to work on trauma and do something.
Angelina Jolie and Louis Garrel Sewing.
With the kind authorization of TIFF
Have you been satisfied with the way Angelina played Maxine? Can you talk a bit about the trip it makes through the film?
I am impressed by the way Angelina immersed himself in the role, totally, [and] How she exposed her fragility. I think that his game is all about the bustle of this disease in the middle of the madness of a fashion world. It is a film about a woman who learned that she had cancer, it is not a film on cancer. In the same way, it is a film on an African young girl arriving in Paris faced with the harshness of this world, and it is not a film on fashion. I wanted to be solidarity between women. With Angelina, we were lucky to have the opportunity to do something from our stitches, to tell a story. We hope to connect it with women who have lived the same experience.
These are the new stories of these women who sail on Paris Fashion Week.
Exactly, yes, and to talk about stitches – Sewing is the title of the film and in French it has a double meaning, with [the word] points. So it’s all the points behind the seam.
Fashion is a metaphor of the contemporary world, which is a world of appearances. I was really interested in behind the scenes of this world, all the women you never see, because when this world is watched, it is from a male point of view. It is from the point of view of a male artistic director, from the point of view of power, etc., and I wanted to show what women did. Women who have no voice, like seamstresses and makeup artists.
The film was created in Tiff, and you could see the reaction of a North American audience to this film. Do you notice a difference in public reactions when you then bring your films at European festivals?
I have not yet seen the reaction. But what we wanted to achieve, with Angelina, is to bring hope and to tell women: “You are not alone.”
The San Sebastian International Film Festival 2025 takes place on September 19 to 27.
