A web of roots – The director Emilie Girardin

For Emilie Girardin, an anti-racist stance is crucial precisely because European culture has not yet overcome its racism. In this sense, her material is always political; not as abstract parables, but tied to real people and emotions. 

This is also reflected in Girardin’s work in the field of docu-fiction. Her first film and her current project are therefore partly documentary and partly fictional. She develops the scripts together with and for people she knows personally. She explains her working method as follows: “I work a lot with improvisation, which is based on my experience in theatre, but also follows the desire to give my actors a say in the narrative.” For Girardin, film is a collective art and she wants to encourage participation right from the writing process. This particular blend of improvisation, auto-fiction, fiction and reality aims to create a special form of realism. Natural, everyday language and multilingualism are the hallmarks of Girardin’s work to date. She names three Polish filmmakers as role models: Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941–1996), Wojciech Has (1925–2000) and Małgorzata Szumowska (*1973). 

A second feature-length docu-fictional film by Emilie Girardin is already in post-production. In “Die Eine tanzt, die Andere nicht” (“One dances, the other does not”), she portrays the friendship between two women who have migrated from their home country, which is thrown into turmoil when one of them becomes unintentionally pregnant.

Although this film is not set in Poland, the director and author maintains close ties to her mother’s country of origin. She says: “I go to Poland at least four times a year. Sometimes because of specific projects, such as for the German-Polish Society Hamburg, whose 50th anniversary I helped to organise. But sometimes just to visit my mum, my grandfather, and my friends in Katowice and Warsaw.” 

For German-Polish relations, she would like to see a deeper engagement with their shared history in order to bring them closer together and reduce projections and prejudices towards the other country. Emilie Girardin would also like to see more intercultural exchange and platforms for Polish arts in Germany.

Anselm Neft, February 2024

The artist online: 
www.emilie-girardin.com