“Within four years, Lilo has emerged from secrecy and become a 64-year-old woman who enjoys DIY projects, gardening, biking, and spending time with her grandchildren,” reads the synopsis for the new film, titled “ A Secret heart (The secret of the heart). “By documenting her transformation, I photographed a family healing its wounds and reinventing a place for everyone. This family is my family, and Lilo is my father.”
Secret heart It has its world premiere on Thursday, May 14 at ACID, the sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival run by the French Film Directors Association.
The documentary is the first feature film from 33-year-old French director Tom Fontenelle, who also handled the cinematography and wrote the film with Valentin Bonaz. The editor is Marie Boutois. Secret heart Produced by 5A7 Films, with Gabin and Fume, Mort! Seller Lightdox handles international sales.
“In these family realities, each individual is forced to recalibrate and confront what remains buried and hidden,” reads a summary on the ACID website. “Little by little, a discreet but irreversible transformation is taking hold.”
Or as Pauline Jeannot, ACID’s general delegate, says: “We start with a family of four whose lives revolve around several stories: the mother mourns, the father goes through a revolution, gender transition begins, and then he drags everyone along with him. An intimate family documentary – a film that couldn’t be more humble – which also turns out to be a melodrama and a family saga.”
Before the film’s premiere, Fontenelle shared with THR Details his family’s cinematic and personal journey that led up to Secret heart.
“At first, the idea was not to make a movie,” he recalls. “When I started photographing my father, it was because I wanted to [address] Difficult things in my family – my mother’s death, for example. And it was really difficult to communicate with my parents. So, I started filming our conversations, and at first, my father was really hesitant.
Then, one day, he asked his son to show him some footage and told him he liked it. “Your pictures are beautiful,” the director recalls of the surprised reaction. Shortly before that, Fontenelle and his sister found women’s clothing in their father’s closet. “We realized he was cross-dressing,” the director said. THR. “When he saw my father [footage]“You can photograph me wearing women’s clothes, too,” he told me.
That’s when the director made a decision. “I started to think there was a film, because of my father’s interest, and because of this new space that was opening up for her and for me,” Fontenelle explained. “And I thought at the time that this was a topic for everyone, because there are universal themes, global themes” that the film addressed.
Fontenelle also felt that the filming process provided space and time for “introspection” for his father and himself. “You have to understand and address the weaknesses to build the future from that,” he said. “I think we knew it, not really consciously, but we felt it. And I realized that this was the path I had to take to make me better and make my family better as well.”
He worked on Secret heart For five years, he finished the film after his father died. Lilou may not have seen the final version, but she did get regular sneak peeks at it. “I was showing her a lot of pictures and a selection [of footage]“It looked good to her,” Fontenelle said. But sometimes she’d just say, “Oh, there’s too much dialogue.”
The premiere at ACID in Cannes is a dream come true for the director. “We can’t hope for anything better,” he said. THR. “And I think it’s a good thing for my parents as well. I know it was very important for her to show this film, and we had a lot of discussions about it. I thought this kind of film could be a great way to educate people about the topic and also help the family. That’s why it was really important for her, for me, for my sister, and I can say, for my mother as well. So, I’m really happy, and I think my father will live [on for] “It’s been a long time now,” Fontenelle concluded, pointing to the sky. “And I know she’s happy somewhere.”
