A web of roots – The director Emilie Girardin
From 1991, Emilie Girardin grew up in a tiny village in the French-speaking part of Switzerland right on the border with the canton of Bern. This meant that not only French but also Swiss German could be heard in the village. At home, the Girardins spoke English, as that was the language in which the parents could communicate. Emilie’s father came from French-speaking Switzerland, her mother from Silesia. She grew up in Bytom and then Katowice, first studied in Kraków and then moved to the USA on a Fulbright scholarship to complete her Master’s degree in psychology. It was there that she met her future husband. The two got married and eventually moved to his native Switzerland.
And so Emilie and her older sister Léa first learnt English, then French when they started school. Polish wasn’t spoken at home. Emilie Girardin explains that it was simply too difficult for her mother: “She was in a foreign place where nobody spoke Polish. She didn’t feel she could teach us Polish all by herself.”
Emilie Girardin first came into contact with the Polish language through her maternal grandparents in Katowice, whom the family visited several times a year. Whilst conversation there was also largely in English, the children on the street and the people in children’s TV programmes such as “Dobranocka” obviously spoke Polish. Emilie Girardin remembers: “We heard the language a lot and learnt words and children’s songs that our Dziadek [grandpa] taught us.”
Emilie Girardin learnt German as a second official language at her Swiss school. At the age of 17, Emilie met a young man from Bielefeld at a punk festival and her German language skills were consolidated. The relationship also took Emilie to Hamburg for the first time, the city where she now lives and works as a director on projects ranging from dance theatre to film.
Emilie Girardin wanted to be an author from an early age. She remembers that even before she learnt to write, she invented her own script and wrote stories to read to her sister. Eventually, however, she found working all by herself at a desk too lonely and decided she would rather work with people on creative projects, and so the desire to make theatre came about. Emilie Girardin graduated from high school with a focus on theatre, then lived for a while in Argentina and Brazil, where she did an internship at the “Theatre of the Oppressed” centre, which is based on the method of theatre pedagogue Augusto Boal (1931–2009).
After returning to Europe, she spent several months in Poland in 2011, during which time she prepared for the entrance exams to various theatre schools. Like her sister a year earlier, Girardin enrolled in a language programme at the Jagiellonian University (Uniwersytet Jagielloński) in Kraków. One of the main reasons for this was her desire to have more time with her grandfather, who had been so important to her and her sister as children. However, after successfully completing the language course and developing a growing attachment to Poland, Girardin moved to Barcelona to study theatre directing at the city’s Institut del Teatre.
During her studies, Girardin developed a growing interest in physical theatre and soon found herself moving away from textual theatre altogether. The Institut del Teatre was just the right place for her, as it has its own section for “physical theatre”. Girardin was able to intern with some interesting theatre makers as a budding director. She recalls: “Of course, there was also a strong fascination with the Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor and his physical theatre. His play ‘Umarła klasa’ was even performed again at the university in Barcelona.”
Emilie Girardin learnt Catalan in Barcelona, a language she says is still part of her everyday life today. Nonetheless, she also found the time to regularly visit her grandfather in Katowice and to spend the semester holidays in Berlin, where she worked as a waitress and went to the theatre. She adored the Berlin Volksbühne, the Schaubühne and the Berliner Ensemble and was fascinated by Castorf and Ostermeier. And she had the idea of doing an Erasmus exchange in Germany. “Of course” she wanted to go to the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin first, but it had no exchange programme with her university in Barcelona. But the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre did. After a semester there, Girardin decided to move to Germany for good and complete her studies in Hamburg.
Girardin’s interest in physical theatre didn’t wane in her new home. After graduating, however, she found the theatre industry to be self-centred and elitist, which led her to work extensively with forms of participatory theatre in an attempt to create a different relationship with the audience. Eventually, she became increasingly interested in film as a medium for self-expression. In 2018, during the Christmas season in Katowice, she came up with the idea of making a film about Silesia. The special history of this region became clear to Girardin when she worked with a choir of German displaced persons from the former eastern territories of the German Reich as an assistant director at Hamburg’s Kampnagel Theatre in 2017, an experience that led her to discover a new aspect of German-Polish history. She spoke to her mother and grandfather about the topic, did some research, asked questions and began shooting her first film in 2019: “The Last To Leave Are The Cranes”. This moving drama is about Nati, a young Chilean woman who travels to Poland to research her family history. There she meets her old friend Mo again and sets off with her on a road trip through Silesia, a journey that puts both her ideas about Europe and her friendship with Mo to the test.
Emilie Girardin fondly remembers the filming and the research that preceded it: “I visited many institutions for German-Polish cooperation in Silesia, got to know many fascinating historians, visited historical sites, and discovered a completely new side to Silesia.”
Over the course of her work in Silesia, Emilie Girardin found herself more deeply rooted in her mother’s homeland and made friends with whom she remains close. She says: “I love Silesia: the landscape, the colours, the architecture, the people. I love the open and supportive welcome I received during my research. I appreciate the unorthodox, inquisitive thinking of the people I know there.”
With the film, Emilie Girardin tried to approach her family history from a perspective that made it possible to narrate the pain of German-Polish history from a certain distance. She is particularly interested in the history of early 20th century Silesia: the (re)emergence of Poland and the simultaneous consolidation of nationalisms in a region characterised by multilingualism and multiculturalism.
Growing up between different cultures taught Girardin from an early age that origins are complex and cannot be reduced to one language, one name or one place. She says: “For me, origin is a web of emotional relationships with people in different places. This openness towards the world is fundamental to my work.”
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
