I was lucky enough to win the JEONJU Cinema Project for my film, Isadora's Children. Four months later, we started the shooting, which lasted until autumn. We presented it the following year at the JEONJU IFF, before the international premiere at the Locarno Film Festival. A help like that, I consider it as freedom. It gives me confidence, a desire to make a totally free, and independent cinema. It's too rare. I dived into my memories of the period when I was a dancer, to try to make a film in which dance is not a setting, but really the subject of the film. Where does the dance, the movement come from? It is also a question of cinema. With this film, I tried to find an answer. My greatest joy and my biggest challenge were to film four actresses with very different ages, bodies, and stories from each other. When I arrived on the film set, each time I had to listen to their energy, by filming them dancing, I was often surprised and moved by what I discovered in each of them. Damien MANIVEL

A Young Poet (2014), The Park (2017), Magdala (2022)

Accompany the Movement of Body 
Isadora’s Children is punctuated by dates that immediately tie its four female characters to a shared experience of time. A red-headed girl (Agathe Bonitzer) is studying Isadora Duncan’s life and work; a dancer (Manon Carpentier) is rehearsing with a choreographer (Marika Rizzi); a member of the audience (Elsa Wolliaston) goes home after attending the performance they put together. The dates could also be taken from Duncan’s diary, which the first character is reading. With their distinctive bodies, the three women navigate the world as hours and days go by, interacting with their surroundings each in their own way. Time is the vessel through which one can mourn, create, wonder or just keep going. Movements taken from Mother, a piece Duncan created after the death of her children, are embraced by each of them, revealing what can be shared despite differences. Following in Duncan’s footsteps, Damien Manivel blurs the line between dance and everyday movements. At the foundation of art lies embodiment. When movement becomes disconnected from an immediate purpose, fulfilling an existential need for expression, perhaps it better fixates emotions, allowing them to travel across centuries, from body to eye and eye to body. There is something brutal about having to phrase what the choreography conveys, as Manon is asked to do, yet words and dance are both symbols, existing as physical forms but also allowing us to distance ourselves from immediate experience, and perhaps rise above it. Damien Manivel uses film to capture such sublimation and take it a step further. Olivia COOPER-HADJIAN

Production MLD Films (contact@mldfilms.com)
Distribution Shellac Distribution (shellac@altern.org)
International Sales Shellac Distribution (shellac@altern.org)

2019 Locarno Best Director (Winner)

2019 San Sebastian IFF Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Special Jury Mention

2019 Sombra Festival Grand Prix (Winner)

2019 Mar del Plata IFF Best Film (Nominee)