Sofia Bohdanowciz's Maison du Bonheur (2017) is exclusively showing August 30 – September 29, 2018 on MUBI in most countries in the world as part of the series Canada's Next Generation.
The film of tomorrow, appears to me then, to be more personal than a novel; it will be individual and autobiographical, like a confession, or an intimate diary. [....] The film of tomorrow, will not be directed by professionals, but by artists for whom shooting a film is a challenging — and thrilling — adventure. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who shot it — and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.
—François Truffaut, Arts magazine, May 15, 1957
In the summer of 2005, I read Truffaut’s biography and devoured it. I had just turned 20 and was just discovering films from the French New Wave. After having survived the oppressive environment of what is surely every filmmaker’s undergrad experience, discovering Truffaut, Varda, Godard, Chabrol and Rohmer soothed me. When I watched The 400 Blows for the first time I had the realization that I could one day make a film that resembled my own life’s experience and that people would be interested in watching it. This simple but direct concept changed me, and when I read Truffaut’s manifesto I decided I would one day make a film which paid homage to his words.
In 2014, I had made a series of short films based on my grandmother’s passing and couldn’t get them programmed. I felt a little defeated, but I got a helping hand when the Polish Consulate in Toronto generously offered to sponsor me so that I could screen my works at the Lightbox. After the screening, a colleague from my day job at the time, Eillen, approached me and said that my filmmaking made her think of her mother and that she would love it if I could make a film about her. I thought she was kidding.
Eillen knew that this was quite the proposition, but when she described Juliane, an astrologer who lived in Montmartre in Paris in the same apartment for over 50 years, I understood her vision immediately, I had suddenly found the thrilling adventure I was looking for. Although my spontaneity and hasty decision to make the film with only one month of pre-production felt foolish at times, I had a feeling it was all going to work out. I didn’t speak with Juliane or have any contact with her before I went to live with her. I simply bought 30 rolls of Kodak Vision 3 16mm film, a Bolex off of eBay and set off to capture what I could.
When I showed up to Juliane’s apartment I was nervous, but when I saw her doormat that read “Maison du bonheur,” I was completely disarmed. When she opened the door, she had a beautiful long, bright blue dress on, her hair was curled and pulled into a stunning updo and she welcomed me into her home with a warm smile. Light was beaming into her living room and I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw her fuchsia hydrangeas pouring off of her balconies onto rue Lapeyrère. I threw my bags in my room, Juliane and I exchanged a few words of introduction and then I remember asking if she wouldn’t mind if I began shooting the film right then and there.
She laughed at my suggestion but was immediately on board. The scene in the film where she is watering her flowers was shot after a mere 20 minutes of knowing each other. For the next 30 days I shot off a 100 foot roll, each one dedicated to different activities, habits and pillars that were important to Juliane. The process of working with her was alchemic, and at at the end of the month I had somehow shot 90 minutes of film which would eventually be cut into a 62 minute feature.
When I finished shooting, my producer and partner Calvin Thomas came to visit and celebrate my 30th birthday. Without my knowing, he had written to Agnès Varda to see if she would be willing to meet me. She never responded, but as a consolation Calvin took me to Montparnasse to rue de Daguerre where she lives and has her studio. We saw (or what we thought was) a storefront with a cartoon cut out of Varda (from The Beaches of Agnès) and walked in thinking that we could purchase some merch. When we opened the door, we realized that it wasn’t a store, Varda herself was sitting there editing what would become Faces Places on Final Cut Pro. Instead of kicking us out, she so very generously invited us to sit in. I was in disbelief. At one point she excused herself to take a call and I heard her say “I know you want to talk about money but I want to talk about the movie.”
When I began to edit the film, those words stayed with me. I had a modest amount of money to wrap things up and as a result, I ended up doing most of the post-production work myself (including Foley and subtitles). I was inevitably self-conscious about releasing a work that was made with such little means, but reminded myself of how Varda made The Gleaners and I and Daguerréotypes. For her, it was never about the money, it was about her practice and curiosity to capture others with the variables she had on hand in a way that was genuine and authentic. When I was struggling to finish Maison du Bonheur, I constantly brought myself back to our chance encounter with Varda and much like Truffaut’s manifesto, it reassured me and transformed the work into the act of love that I was looking for.