Charlotte Le Bon goes behind the camera for the first time in a personal and sensitive film, Falcon Lake.

Charlotte Le Bon in the movie Yves Saint-Laurent – Copyright Thibault Grabherr and Anouchka de Williencourt / SND

A personal drama

After two short films, Charlotte Le Bon is inspired by a personal drama that she tinges with her affection for the fantastic. The director films Falcon Lake as an ode to the nature of her native Quebec. Its immense forests are the main setting for the awakening of two touchingly clumsy teenagers. Screened at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, Falcon Lake is released on Wednesday 7 December. Adapted from the comic book A Sister, by Bastien Vives, Falcon Lake takes place in a landscape of Quebec lakes. In this film Charlotte Le Bon offers us a beautiful story of adolescence, tinged with melancholy and ghosts. Bastien is fourteen and Chloé is sixteen. His parents and his mother decided to spend their summer in Quebec. In this setting of lakes and forests, Bastien and Chloé like each other. Charlotte le Bon films their hesitation, between sudden rapprochements and distancing. These two teens challenge each other as much as they protect themselves.

Melancholy and ghosts

Falcon Lake is the story of this adolescence, of the excitement, the fear, the raw desire and the remnants of childhood. In his film, there are also plenty of ghosts: “I love ghosts, the world of the supernatural, I love what we are not really able to explain. I love between two worlds, it’s something that fascinates me again. I was grieving very early in my life because I lost my father when I was ten. So I think that was very important to me perhaps to romanticize death. It was my way of being able to tame my mourning and to make it something pretty and to make a story out of it, to transform death into a kind of reassuring presence that accompanies everywhere, in fact, which are a bit like ghosts, benevolent ghosts, because there are malevolent ones too.”