Nana

Valérie Massadian : 2011

Nana is four years old and lives in a stone house, beyond the forest in the French countryside. Living apart from other children, she interacts on a daily basis only with her mother, her reserved grandfather and the natural world itself, its beauty and its violence. One day, back from school in the late afternoon, all she finds is silence in the empty house. Unperturbed, Nana embarks alone upon a journey into the night of her childhood, the world from her height. She walks with a childlike purity through a world that is partly paradise, partly hard and realistic. Shot from the perspective of a child, it is a film that touches life, death and resistance more through primal sensations than explicit narrative, more through a feminine understanding of the world than an intellectual one. Intimate and sensitive, and completely devoid of sentimentality, Valérie Massadian's debut feature is about the basic questions of life as experienced directly in the middle of the process of awakening. A remarkable collaboration between director and performer, the film won the award for Best First Feature at Locarno Film Festival 2011.