TALENTED MR LEGRAND

By Tim Wilson Photography: Sebastião Palha

His first short film, Before losing everything, won the Grand Prix of the International Short Film Festival of Clermont-Ferrand in 2013 and a Cesar in 2014, the same year it earned an Oscar nomination. We met him at a café in Pantheon and he told us about his film’s subject of family violence, about what it means to be an actor and director in France as well as about the next film he is working on.

“Domestic violence is a difficult subject for the cinema. I am feminist. I believe in equality between men and women. But today in the 21st century a lot of this violence still goes on and we can’t see it. It happens behind the walls and no-one likes to see it, to talk about it, to know or to hear about this. But even if nobody talks about it, domestic violence is very much alive and present in our modern century. In France there is one woman victim every 2,5 days.

We live in a still patriarchal society. Today women are still dominated by the males in the family. It’s only 45 years since the notion that the father is the ruler of the family was abolished. But it’s still in everybody’s memory. It’s going to take more time to change this”. (NOMAS Paris, p. 88)