The director Justine Triet (Paris, 1978) returns to the Seville Festival with the premiere of 'Sibyl' in Spain, after the screening of her previous films, 'Victoria' and 'La bataille de Solférino'. This time, she competes in Official Section with this story about a psychoanalyst who returns to her first vocation: writing. "The plot approaches a character who, rather than a victim of their problems, is someone who solves them by getting into them." It is this idea of resistance that holds hope, because the tricky thing is to "stand firmly when everything crumbles," she said.
Margot, the character who unleashes all this change, is embodied by Adele Exarchopoulos, known for her roles in 'La Vie d'Adèle' (AbdellatifKechiche, 2013) or 'The White Crow' (Ralph Fiennes, 2018). The director has stated that "in France it is problematic to do a casting with well-known actors. I proposed the role of Adèle to an older woman and she didn't want to. I chose Adèle because she was exceptional in the scene where she says there's something dirty inside of her."
In this case, Adèle Exarchopoulos plays a desperate actress whose life is, in the eyes of her therapist (Virginie Efira), a manna for literature. The meeting between these two women puts on-screen issues such as entangled feelings, psychology, fiction and cinema. In this process of self-healing, the protagonist has to go to her past, but Triet claims that it is not about flashbacks because "although there is a hatred of herself towards her past, she is not remembering but discovering it, which means a revelation for her".
Triet finds it difficult to talk about the film, as the writing process was somewhat complicated. Her idea was to "go from one fiction to another. Starting with someone who is writing, but when she comes into action, she comes across something artificial." Regarding the creative process, Triet says she does not consider what is the use of comedy to tell tragic stories. "I love to tell comedy. I like to laugh at everything, but there's also some modesty in that," she said.
'Sibyl' is a film in whichthe best Woody Allen becomes a Frenchified, a film that summons 'Eva al desnudo' and recreates itself in 'Stromboli', putting in check as manipulation and betrayal. For the author, these terms "do not always have to be valued from a moral point of view, but in cinema you can take into account other representations, such as her playful or playful sense to surprise the viewer", because "when I think of myself as an spectator,what I like best is to be surprised," Triet concluded.
