WILD WOMEN
INTRODUCTION
Extract from the director's statement by Cécile Mavet
In a world increasingly polarized outward, where everything is designed to cut us off from nature, from our bodies, and from ourselves, I want WILD WOMEN to be a door that will bring us back to our interiority. I want the film to invite us to an experience that is both sensorial and existential ; in the words of Alain Cavalier, « to make the sleeping water inside a heart quiver ».
For several years now, I have combined my own existential questioning with encounters with women who have dedicated their lives to spiritual research. Collecting the words of these women became a real calling; through the story of their journey, spiritual questioning took on a particular flavor that I felt had never been explored.
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WILD WOMEN
Nathalie Delay
France
Petite Soeur Elie Emmanuel
Belgium
Rabbi Shefa Gold
USA
Hayat Nur Artiran
Turkey
Annick de Souzenelle
France
WILD WOMEN is the story of an initiatory journey, towards a form of inner freedom. It is the story of a plunge into the cycles of life which concern nature and its seasons as much as our physical, emotional and psychic life. It is the story of a spiritual transmission, from woman to woman, of something that is extremely difficult to name but which finds its meaning in the word “wild”. Like an ancestral knowledge that we would have lost but which would always be inscribed in us and would only ask to be restored.
The spine of the film revealed itself little by little. In order for these women’s words to become a cinematographic experience, the film had to plunge us into a real journey of initiation. So I decided to take the camera with me on a six-month retreat experience of my own, alone in the forest: in the silence of a hermitage, I would revisit the words of those I had filmed and let them guide me. I had no idea what this experience would provoke in me and what would emerge from it. I was sure only of my commitment, absolute and sincere, to this adventure, which was the culmination of a long path of research and discovery that had somehow "trained" me for the interior life. All my work as a filmmaker has been an effort to make visible the exploration of this interior territory, which is by its very essence invisible. By using the subjective camera and thanks to the voice of my diary, I share this experience step by step and take the viewer along with me. I film the void, the passing of time, the silence. In the simplicity of life in a hut, I find poetry in the smallest of things.