WILD WOMEN is in many ways a daring film for our times. Though it’s not unusual to have filmmakers dive into their personal stories, it is less frequent for someone to go on a quest to find the place that spirituality can still have in our personal inner paths and in society.

In the present era, in which the space between our opinions and our identities seems to have gotten so small, and where spirituality and thoughtfulness have been discarded by many people, sharing one’s questioning and search about spirituality in such a respectful way is rare and valuable. Humankind is facing major challenges and Cecile’s acute, personal and raw questioning resonates with the global state of the world, connecting the personal to the global. We need to take time to remain present to the questions we are faced with instead of searching for immediate answers and solutions. Paying attention, taking care, connecting the outside and inner worlds, facing our past, our scares and wounds… It is precisely to this suspended time of the question, often uncomfortable in our lives, that Cecile’s film invites us to. An enriching experience both for her, the people she meets and us spectators.

CBA - Centre de l'Audiovisuel à Bruxelles
Javier PACKER COMYN

Is it possible to express the unspeakable?
To reveal the invisible?
To share the most intimate of intimacies without spoiling it?
Such is the daring undertaking of Cécile Mavet in her first feature length documentary, WILD WOMEN.

“If you don’t go into the woods, nothing will ever happen.
If you don’t go into the woods, your life will never begin.” *

The film opens in the intimacy of the forest, an alchemical domain where so many tales begin.  A feminine mirror revealing casted shadows of our deepest fears buried in the soil of our psyche, but also revealing our most redemptive and instinctive magic.

Following the footsteps of four initiators, each with a unique journey and anchored like master trees in a living spirituality which finds its sap in their presence in the world, Mavet invites us to follow her on this less traveled path, the one that underlies the bark of reality and leads to the vibrant heart of being.

Like nature itself, the soul questions, echoing the words of Sister Elie Emmanuel, “Will you be able to stay?”  

Will you, like the tree, be able to welcome the storm as much as you welcome the song of the bird?
Will you be able to have the patience of the leaf beneath the frost?
Will you be able to slow your pace enough to perceive the subtlest of shades, as day makes its transition into night?   
And will you be able to recognize these deeply feminine cycles as the seasons of your own soul?

Now Go!  Enter the cinema as you would enter the darkness of the forest.  Conscientiously. Respectfully.  Lovingly.

Between “Go” and “Stay”, the borders between Self and World dissolve.  Will you lose your self to find it?   

And from the warm movie theatre of uterine red, you will not emerge unchanged.  For as there can be no childbirth without convulsions, this quest for the Intimate and its epiphanous laying bare of the soul cannot be accomplished without spasm or heartbreak…

“So go!” whispers the Wild Woman, “And give birth to yourself!”