Axelle Ropert

Axelle Ropert directed three features: THE WOLBERG FAMILY (2009) which was nominated for The Golden Camera Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, MISS AND THE DOCTORS (2013) which won the Best New Director Award at the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival, and THE APPLE OF MY EYE (2016) which competed at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival. She is also screenwriter for other directors such as Serge Bozon, Patric Chiha or Blandine Lenoir. Since 2018, her films and other works have been the subject of retrospectives at prestigious international festivals in Argentina, Sweden and Spain.

Director’s statement

“At the origin of the film there is a subject that is very close to my heart: divorce, but told from the child’s point of view, and not the parents’. I belong to a generation, those who were teens in the 1980s whose parents started to divorce en masse. It was a real sociological phenomenon. Our grandparents stayed together for life, our parents separated... I am part of this generation to whom this real break happened, a break that makes family histories very different from those of the previous model. [...] When I was writing the film, I discovered the existence of many forums in which the children of divorced parents, now adults, shared their experiences. It was very moving to realize that, whatever the social class, the same traumas of abandonment, of a world being torn asunder, of destruction, and sadness, persist, even in adulthood. [...] the end of family love is a huge theme which is tricky to tackle because one of the challenges was to avoid making a film that would make parents feel guilty. It seems impossible to film a separation without filming the violence between the parents. [...] We have a slightly distorted vision of teenagers because in recent years, films have focused on naturalistic, silent, aggressive, bristling teenagers... I wanted to portray a young girl who loves to the point of losing her mind... Nothing tears me up more in life than very gentle people who you feel are going to be crushed by the implacable wall of reality. And I think Solange has a great trajectory in the film: from the luminous candour of the start to the final darkness... I wanted to tell that story: the brutal loss of innocence, the entry into adulthood which inevitably involves learning about hardness. I don’t know if PETITE SOLANGE is a tender film. In the end, I think it’s a rather violent film which wears a mask – it’s up to us to decide what’s behind the mask. And audiences all have their own take on the final scene in the back garden: some find it tender and bright, others very hard and dark... And I find that fascinating. There is also another geographical reference: Italy. Because Italy is the natural home of melodrama! The other source film for PETIT SOLANGE is Luigi Comencini’s Incompreso, a poster of which is seen in the film. There is something about the light, the cruelty, the lyricism of a certain kind of Italian music, and also the sweetness of the implacable course of things.”