Munich: Retrospective for the filmmaker Claire Simon – Munich

Perhaps these are the true cinephiles, those filmmakers who make both feature films and documentaries – and often films that are both, in which the two genres interplay. In this sense, the large series of films by Claire Simon, which begins on Tuesday, January 9th at the Film Museum, takes us directly to the origins of cinema.

Claire Simon has been making films for 40 years, but she is hardly known here. The films and their stories start from places, sometimes they stay in that one place the whole time.

A small schoolyard in “Récréations” where she films her daughter and her schoolmates during their class breaks. The Bois de Vincennes, east of Paris, the largest green space in the city, in “Le bois dont les rêves sont faits”, the enchanted forest from which dreams are made. A center for family planning in Paris, where women receive advice, in “Les bureaux de dieu/The Office of God” – those seeking help are real clients, the counselors are played by stars like Nathalie Baye, Béatrice Dalle or Nicole Garcia.

Nicole Garcia also stars in the film “Gare du Nord”, 2013, which was shot at the Paris train station, which with its labyrinthine dimensions conjures up a sense of fate and otherworldliness, where people become phantoms.

In the same year, Simon also shot a second film in this train station, in which the sociology professor Simon, an old childhood friend and son of Algerian immigrants, interviews passengers and passers-by. The film is called “Géographie humaine” and it’s about origins and home, foreignness and security. “The closest thing can lead very far, into the vastness that desire and dreams open up,” wrote Romain Lefebvre in October about the work of Caire Simon Cahiers du cinéma.

Individual women are always the focus. In 2002, Simon and the sixty-year-old “Mimi” roamed through places from their past, Nice and the mountain village of Saorge, together the two women conjured up France’s history in the last century. “Vous ne désirez que moi” is about the writer Marguerite Duras, artfully reflected in the love story of Duras with her gay partner, Yann Andréa, who is 40 years her junior.

For her last film to date, “Notre Corps”, Claire Simon went to the gynecology department of a Paris hospital; it’s about birth and fertilization and cancer diagnosis, about the presence of bodies, those of women, trans bodies and that of the filmmaker herself. The film premiered at the Berlinale last year, it will be shown at the Filmmuseum on Sunday, January 14th, and Claire Simon will be present at the screening.

Retrospective Claire SimonTue, Jan. 9, to Wed, Feb. 28, Munich Film Museum, St.-Jakobs-Platz 1, tickets by calling 23324150