Miryam Charles Interview
In 2008 a teenage girl was found dead in her room in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Cette Maison weaves together documentary and fiction, time and place, to tell the story of this devastating crime and the family left behind. Cinema For All spoke to director Miryam Charles about their outstanding and personal feature debut:
The film is incredibly personal to you and your family, I wondered at what point you decided you wanted to tell this story through film and why this felt like the right time?
I made seven short films before making Cette Maison and they were always personal stories of mine; telling stories about me or memories of my family and the people that I feel close to. I never really intended on making a feature film because I love short film. I love the idea of working for a year on a project and then being done with it and moving on to something new. My goal was to make short films for the rest of my life, and it was a good friend of mine, who is also a filmmaker and producer, who saw my short films and convinced me to make a feature film. It took almost a year and a half of him emailing me very beautiful messages about how he believed in me and how he believed I could make a feature film. So in that year I would politely decline but still think about what I could do. Since all of my films are personal, and I try to be more courageous with every project, if I accepted doing a feature it was going to be the biggest project that I’ve worked on, so I really thought of what scared me the most at the time, and it was the death of my cousin. As a family, maybe to protect ourselves, after she died we stopped talking about her, like she never existed. I really wanted to pay an homage to her, to her mother, to us as a family, and try to open a dialogue about the incredible life that she had. Before doing so, I asked permission from family members, if I could do this and they said yes and were actually really relieved in a way. I’m very lucky to be in a family, even amongst the extended family, we know each other very well, so they knew I would be very respectful about it and that I wasn’t looking to make a true crime film.
It's interesting to hear you talk about your love of the short film form, it feels like there is several films taking place within Cette Maison; the documentary elements, the imagined elements, even time begins to blur and overlap. When you decided to tell this story, did you always know you’d have to tell it this way or was that something you came to later?
It was from the beginning. When I started to write the script, I knew I was never going to make a traditional documentary with interviews. Mainly because I’m very shy and my family is very shy, and I didn’t want to impose on them and have that very difficult subject, that we never really talked about, put in front of a camera. From the beginning I tried, I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I wanted to tell the story as a fractured memory. How trauma effects memory. When I started to do audio interviews with family members, I realised we remembered the same events but in a different way. I realised that the traumatic experience that we all went through effected the memory of my cousin. I tried to translate that in a cinematic form.
We spoke about the form there and the film is incredibly beautifully shot on 16mm, could you tell us about the decision to shoot on that format?
The answer I usually give is that it’s because I’m older than I look. When I studied, I learned to shoot on Super8 and Super 16. When I graduated, most of my films were shot on film. I could have shot Cette Maison on digital, but for me, especially 16mm film, the images are not that precise. It relates to memories and a dreamlike quality that I really wanted for the film, so for me it was very important.
Certain scenes play like a home movie.
Exactly. It’s pretty difficult if you don’t have a technological object to date the film. You can say “that was shot in the 70s maybe in the 2000s or 2024”. So for me that quality of not being able immediately say whether we’re in the present or the past, it was important.
Both as a filmmaker and a part of the story, your voice becomes a really important part of the film. Was that something that was difficult and was there ever a temptation to create a distance there?
Maybe in a way to protect myself, when I wrote the film, I was very convinced that I was making a film about my cousin and her mother. This is not about me; this is not my story. It really helped me to write the film and send it to get financing, because it wasn’t about me. After a while, after talking to the producers and the actors, I was like “ah, this is also about me and my family”, so I was a bit scared when I realised that. I’m at peace with it now but it was difficult.
You mentioned there about your work with the actors, all of the performances are incredible, but that must have been a really strange casting process for you. Casting people to play members of your family. Could you tell us about that unique relationship with the actors?
It was a very interesting process. I think it was more challenging for the actors than it was for me, because I know there was a lot of pressure on their part to honour my family members, but for me it was a very easy process. All the actors that are in the film, I wrote the parts for them. I knew it was going to be Schelby who played my cousin and Florence as her mother. They are incredibly human beings, incredible actors, and I’ve known them for years. I’ve known Schelby since we were kids, so for me it was very easy. She’s like a family member without being a family member and I could say that for all of the actors, even the ones who have smaller roles in the film. It was the same with the crew, they’ve known me for years. It was a peaceful and warming and kind environment to be in. For me it was like making a film with family.
Which must be really important when you’re working with such delicate and personal subject matter.
Yeah, exactly. They know me very, very well. They knew some days, like the day we shot the scene in the morgue, to be very quiet on set. Everyone was using little voices, just to be sure that I was okay. It was a very difficult day but very beautiful also.
Now you’ve had some distance from the initial release, it’s played at some huge film festivals, how has that process been; putting something out there into the world that means so much to you and your family?
I’m very grateful that my family got to see the film. They came to the premier in Montreal and it was a such a beautiful moment. We cried together, and we also laughed together. The most beautiful reaction I had was from my dad who said, “the film is very you; I saw you on the screen”. I was very proud of that moment. I was not prepared for people coming up to me after the screenings of the film, from all over the world, and confiding in me about violence or traumatic events in their life. It made me realise how much violence there is in the world, and how much violence against women, and I wasn’t prepared for that. I gave a lot of hugs to people I didn’t know. I’m glad that people felt safe enough to come to me and talk to me about those things. I’m happy that as it’s not a traditional documentary, in its structure it’s not a classical film, that people who don’t necessarily understand all of it still get an experience out of it, even if they don’t like it.