By stirring up the scum of festivals, you always find pearls. After our selection of short films where you were suggested the filmography of director Joséphine Darcy Hopkins, who was discovered at FEFFSWe offer you an interview about his work, his influences and his gaze on cinema. We also share a few leads to discover her films with a signature that combines fantastic and real sensitivity.
Interview with Josephine Darcy Hopkins
At dusk of the real mature shadows
Marked by Lynch's work, which she quotes from the beginning when one evokes his influences, his cinema is always located at the edge of the fantastic, at the border of reality and its margins. It is also the sensitivity of a director who enquires not to injure an applicant in tears at a casting, after discovering the harsh synopsis of the Teeth of happiness. Short films are the ground for the most fulcruming experiments, like the New extraordinary stories d The emanation of the fantastic always appears clearly, without explanation of indigent texts and as a catalyst of existential anxieties. There is always an invisible part that only personal interpretation gives to see. The fantastic imposes itself as discovered by the character of the novel Other side d-Alfred Kubin:
« All illusions were naturally realities »
In The Day Mom became a MonsterThis is the shadow part of motherhood, highlighted by the monster figure, which resides in the hollow of each of us. The opening sequence immediately plays on our perception of reality and the propensity of our imagination to generate its own interpretive horizon. While the mother tells a story in Chinese shadows to the girl, her captivating voice introduces the venom of doubt, where every silence questions the viewer about maternal intention. One is suspended from the lips of a parent who improvises and guesses hostile. In Cloud, the court seizes the pre-apocalyptic opportunity of a radioactive maelstrom about to choke life. Objective: to reveal the heart of human relations by the prism of two teenage girls, finally freed from all (or almost all) parental responsibility. The mother becomes burden again in this second court of the director. Cloud appropriate the cavalry codes whose model Thelma and Louise signs flight as freedom in the very sense of escape.
The figure of the father in all these films is not even to the extent of the spectrum. Simply out of frame by default, his absence is not even felt. Without risking a freudian reading, recognize that this 100% feminine configuration in the short films of Josephine Darcy Hopkins knows how to free from the poncif of the broken family, whose existence would be deprived of meaning due to the said lack. The father's not here, so what? The only time he appears is to bury in Cloud. Later, it is another masculine avatar, barely visible from the window of the first floor where he calls Eugénie. Immediately, she takes the powder from the campette without even giving her a look. The father is the negative of the fantastic, his absence, natural.
True life is absent
Whether you take one or the other of these shorts, the fantastic is just a motor of narration. Writing systematically seeks to release its characters from a carcan that is guessed too narrow. The position of careless, if not naughty, childhood is swept away by a back of the hand by the director, who believes in young people who are otherwise more responsible than our society so anxious to mark obedience. Already in his final film Margins, the monster's theme unfolded in a hostile environment for a young girl harassed and under the influence of contrary feelings towards an unhealthy teacher. Children also convent a monster in themselves, like a parthenogenesis that already prepares the potential of adult cruelty.
This is for example the image of the initiatory ritual to cruelty symbolized by the twins of the game Resident Evil Code Veronica, where they rip out the wings of a dragonflyor heroinEgo by reproduction and social pressure or children of excellent fantastic thriller The Innocents By the discovery of unlimited power and shifting it to original murder. « I don't believe in the cliché of angelic children. » claimed the director Eskyl Vogt (see our Interview) which most certainly abounded the psychology of the cruel children of the Tooths of Happiness. Josephine Darcy Hopkins admits that he later realized that these themes are an integral part of a part of his own story. After all, is it not said that the work is the imprint of the author's personality?
Despite the eruption of physical horror in the Day Mom became a Monster or that of the social violence suffered by the child Teeth of happiness, reduced to tearing out teeth to compete against small bourgeois women as wealthy as insolent, his works never yield to resignation or fatalism. Literally, there is no shadow without a projection of light, which the Franco-British director never forgets. Horror also emanates from the indifference of the other person who is inferior and who is sought to dominate by a game with rules pegged in advance. In fact, psychological violence is more unsustainable than physical suffering. The Tooths of Happiness draw the contours of learning class consciousness; Margins shows the topography of repeated harassment pressures that determine the personalities of its authors. Harassment that affects the body, inseparable from being.
It rains tears
Many of these protagonists show enthusiasm in the most etymological sense of the term, as animated by an inspiration that limits to divine exaltation. There is that of Gloria (Anna Gaia Bellugi) in Inexorable where the young woman can only touch the satisfaction of her desire through the systematic abolition of the frontiers imposed by mental balance. Whatever the consequences, the will always has a time ahead of reason. Thus, if Gloria's aura dies the screen, it goes beyond the simple objective of possessing the cursed writer, played by Benoist Poelvoorde, artist ruined by doubt and ransom for a tinted success of imposture. It is because it is about filling a vacuum, more painful than it is the upcoming test for Gloria like Candice, Eugénie or Madeleine.
Gloria is a model for the little couple with apparent social success. But desire, like a malignant tumor, is also about transfer and invisible communicating vases. Each of the shorts does not forget to capture these moments of show where children like to stage for the pleasure of an imaginary audience or not. Maybe we read the premise of the clumsy finaleInexorable in the karaoke scenes and songs of these shorts, manipulation and revenge prevail. Josephine does not hide her appeal for music that always suddenly sounds in these films like a new space to explore. The latter participates in the process of writing, an obsessive ritual, we dare say, where listening to a playlist in a loop shapes the imagination.
The fantastic flight point?
And yet behind this melancholy, the director does not lose sight of the light, even behind the thickness of the fog. « It's all right. » the two heroines in the final Cloud, one of her in a fetal position under the ashes that will soon allow life to germinate when the eruption is a distant memory. Or this last image of the radiant smile of Teeth of happiness, like an address to those who sort. Then the fantastic is talking to us. In the image of Alice who followed the white rabbit, the characters of Josephine Darcy Hopkins can only reveal themselves after an endless fall, then once they have fled from the other side of the mirror. The one of a world where one asks only to disembowel the folder of the real to better liberate beings.
Josephine Darcy Hokins, director
Born in England, Josephine Darcy Hopkins then emigrated to France at the age of nine to join Meyronne, a municipality in the Southwest. It will then integrate IESRA in Paris from 2014 where she will make these first short films, Margins (2016) in draft studies, The Day Mom became a Monster (2017) and Cloud (2020). In 2022, she co-written the thriller Inexorable to the implacable tension that we already talked about in our columns Here, during our exchange with Fabrice Du Welz between the Strange Festival and the FEFFS. His latest short film, The Tooths of Happiness (2023) was awarded in Strasbourg this autumn.
Filmography
- 2023 : The Teeth of Happiness
- 2022 : Inexorable (co-writer)
- 2020 : Cloud
- 2017 : The Day Mom became a Monster
- 2016 : Margaux (co-director and co-writer)
Margins
Source France | Release date : 2016| Where to see the movie? Vimeo
Implementation : Josephine Darcy Hopkins, Rémy Barbe, Joseph Bouquin | Production : The films of La Mouche | Duration : 16 min
It was through the small window of horror that Josephine Darcy Hopkins entered the world of cinema by realizing Margins with Rémy Barbe and Joseph Bouquin in end-of-school film at ESAR. The one who saw little Sleeping Beauty an incalculable number of times detricates the pivotal stage between childhood and adulthood. Awareness of his sexuality and power of seduction but also, again and again, the cruelty of others, starting with those of his pairs: three teenagers who make him live hell. To this is added a young teacher, a new horrific declination of a manly ascendant mobilized for perverse purposes. Despite a likely small production budget, Margins Yet succeeds in taking us to the guts, as carried away by this torrent of opposite emotions that can pass through a young woman haunted by this new world that closes on her. Dispossessed of his own body, his human relations disintegrate into visceral horror. A first punch movie that reminds us at times Possession of Andrzej-uławski.
The day Mom became a Monster
Source France | Release date : 2017| Where to see the movie? Youtube
Implementation : Josephine Darcy Hopkins| Production : The films of La Mouche | Duration : 23 min
First short film by Josephine Darcy Hopkins, The day Mom became a Monster is of formidable effectiveness. As its name suggests from the beginning, a little girl will see her mother turn into a strange creature. The opening sequence can immediately set its felted atmosphere while the mother tells a story in Chinese shadows to her little one. The fantastic seems to simmer between the lines of the imagination, while one shares a certain apprehension at the crossroads of reality. The complicity of the mother and her daughter will also accomplish her total motivating towards horror by reversing the roles of parenthood with tenderness.
Cloud
Source France | Release date : 2020 | Where to see the movie? Channel +
Implementation : Josephine Darcy Hopkins | Production : To be continued | Duration 28 minutes
Second short film by Josephine Darcy Hopkins, Cloud is a short pre-apocalyptic that features two teenage girls to opposite personalities: Capucine is confident in appearance, animated by an insolent fergue and Eugénie is otherwise more reserved. As a radioactive cloud prepares to fall down on the city, the film turns towards the road movie. Writing correctly, the ambiguity of teenage relations is emerging between transfers, desires and angers repressed on the web of mourning. The director signs a second particularly sensitive court where theode to real life – which is known to be absent – comes to push a world marked by standards. A film that breathes freedom and the desire to say shit to social conventions and injunctions.
Inexorable
Source France Belgium | Release date : 2022 | Where to see the movie? Channel + DVD, Blu-ray
Output: Fabrice du Welz | Screenwriter : Fabrice du Welz, Josephine Darcy Hopkins and Aurélien Molas | Production : The Jokers | Duration 1h38
Inexorable. Latin inexorabilis, « which one cannot bow by prayers, from which one cannot escape, implacable ». A title all found for this home invasion directed by Fabrice du Welz and co-scenarized with Josephine Darcy Hopkins and Aurélien Molas. Thriller in camera where the relations of classes and desire sway and deconstruct, Inexorable offers us a duet to the firmament with Anna Gaïa Bellugi, an unworked young girl who will simmer in the life of Benoït Poelvoorde, never as talented as when it is used against employment. A classic thriller in form but effective by its writing where situations and characters strove before fatality.
The Tooths of Happiness
Source France | Release date : 2022 | Where to see the movie? Arte
Implementation : Josephine Darcy Hopkins | Production : To be continued | Duration 24 min
Third court of Josephine Darcy Hopkins, The Tooths of Happiness just got awarded at the FEFFS where he received the silver meliès. Probably the most social of the three courts, The Tooths of Happiness is a sensitive proposition where the world of adults and children is mirrored. Madeleine, eight years old, accompanies her beautician mother to new wealthy clients. While her mother joins both ends, she is invited to play with other children in a board game where money is the engine of success. The carelessness of childhood is then confronted with a bitter class struggle, where one pays for his flesh because of his social class. Crude metaphor but where cynicism never wipes hope, The teeth of happiness is worn by exceptional young actresses as well as writing to the scalpel. To be seen urgently.
« It's still with kids, except this time it's with two sisters... »
[...] Josephine Darcy Hopkins, on the edge of the real? [...]
[...] Darcy Hopkins to whom it owes excellent independent film costs (see our interview file), Du Welz being not entirely satisfied with the first version of Aurélien Molas. [...]