alr

Nana

Director in Person
Screening on Film
$12 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Valérie Massadian.
With Kelyna Lecomte, Marie Delmas, Alain Sabras.
France, 2011, 35mm, color, 68 min.
French with English subtitles.

The feature film debut of current and remarkably accomplished Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow Valérie Massadian is a visually ravishing and enigmatically disquieting fable of a young child's self-reliance and precocious discovery of the brooding shadow world of adulthood. Shot in rural France, Nana centers with resolute fixity upon its titular heroine, a four-year-old girl portrayed by non-actor Kelyna Lecomte, and her slowly unwinding daily life on her grandfather's pig farm. Massadian's wonderfully elliptical film opens deep mysteries as the adults each disappear from the film and frame, a brute fact accepted with stoic solemnity by the child. Other mysteries linger within Massadian's assured long-takes and within the brute adult phrases spoken in fractured monologue by Nana herself. Massadian's artistic career began not in cinema but in still photography, where she worked as assistant to the legendary Nan Goldin, an experience that clearly grounds her careful framing and depth of imagery. Inspired by a revelatory experience with the films of Pedro Costa, Massadian ambitiously and successfully embraces a rigorous ethics of realism, launching an infinitely promising filmmaking career. – Haden Guest

Nana introduction and post-screening discussion with David Pendleton and Valérie Massadian. ©Harvard Film Archive

PRECEDED BY

  • America

    Directed by Valérie Massadian.
    With Solomon Calvert-Adera.
    France/US, 2013, DCP, color, 7 min.
    French with English subtitles.

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait