French filmmaker Stephane Demoustier says that the genesis of his project was born by reading a case similar to the one he fictionalized in “The Girl with the Bracelet” in Argentina. But the real reason that pushed him to write and direct his third film was his children. When he became a father, he began to wonder to what extent it is possible to know the flesh of your flesh. And so she set out to shape this surprising story of trials in which she portrays a generation, not that of the adolescent protagonist, but rather that of those who watch her from the room. And, by the way, to the spectators.
I think that we constantly ask those of us who have children, in some way, how well we know them. That idea of having someone so close to you and who can be so different away from your side is always “, explains the filmmaker, visiting Madrid to present a film in which, little by little, as part of the jury, the Parents, and the public unravel the mysteries surrounding this teenager whom the police accuse of having murdered her best friend. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the reason that would have led her to commit such a savage act. She excuses herself: the victim was still alive when she left the house after a party with classmates from high school.
THINGS OF AGE
From the bench, the accused begins to see how the Prosecutor’s Office prepares an arsenal of evidence that ranges from recordings of the cell phones of her colleagues to messages on social networks. One of them was a death threat. “He published that he wanted to kill her as he said before, ‘I love you.’ We all say it without meaning, “says one of the witnesses, who shared a desk with the protagonist. I was attracted to the desire to shoot a trial, which is very cinematic, but what interested me? You don’t see it in American trial films, is that the viewer is in the same situation as someone who attends the courtroom: in a trial where there is no irrefutable evidence when the verdict is reached, the doubts are still there, and I want the audience, each according to their experience, to get wet in one way or another, the filmmaker explains.
To confirm his approach, Demoustier brought together young people of the age of his central character to help him make credible his experiences and, above all, what the judge and jury saw on the boys ‘smartphones.’ “I did not want that portrait that I present of young people to be something that responded to my ghosts,” he points out about the cases of blackmail among adolescents through intimate videos. What caught my attention was that I was afraid of going too far with those videos, of having fantasized too much. And I showed them to teenagers, and they all told me they were familiar with and knew people who had happened to them like this. Those kinds of stories are already something banal for them. Bland no, because it is violent for those who live it, but it is expected,” explains the director, who concentrates all this experience in the gaze of the debutant Melissa Guers, who elevates this original way of telling prejudices about adolescence.
