Le Film de Mon Père

Jules Guarneri – Director’s Note

I grew up in Villars, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. My parents adopted my older brother and sister. I arrived in the midst of it all by accident. I am the only biological son of my father, who lived off a private income and never had to work, and of my mother, a Belgian aristocrat who died when I was still in my teenage years.

I always saw them as fictional characters. My father reminds me of Colonel Kurz, the doomed individual from Apocalypse Now. My brother looks like the Indian giant from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and my sister could be straight out of a melodrama.

At a young age, I picked up a camera to make ski videos and it became my passion. But my film buff father always dreamt of me doing narrative films. So, when I came up with the idea of making a documentary about my family three years ago, he immediately bought a video camera, a tripod and a microphone to film himself on a daily basis.

His goal: to give me this footage so that I could finally make my first film. It is both a way to encourage me, to lead me towards a certain independence and also, a way to keep control. Personally, I saw in him and in his actions a compelling film. I was launched.

This project quickly became a personal quest for me. The more I went on making this film, the more I evolved and matured. The more I detached myself from my father’s grip. This quest, both creative and emancipatory, is at the heart of this documentary. I set out to find my calling: to make films.

It all started when my mother died. During this period of mourning, my father began to invest himself overly in the lives of his children. He made it his mission to make us independent and to do everything my mother would have wanted to do for us. Above all, he started building a chalet for me in his garden so that I could come back and live next to him.

In the face of these events numerous questions come to the surface. To what extent can we impose the legacy we wish to pass on to our children? How to leave the family nest? How to grow up and become an adult? How to free oneself from the weight that a family can generate or on the contrary what to keep and hold dear?

This documentary aims at questioning our family relationships. It is as much a documentary about my own construction as a young adult and filmmaker as it is about grief, the impossible heritage and the difficulty of transmission.