GRANNY’S SEXUAL LIFE
DIRECTED BY URŠKA DJUKIĆ, ÉMILIE PIGEARD
SLOVENIA, FRANCE // 2021
13 MINS
A trip into grandmother's youth and the memories of her intimate life illustrate the status of Slovenian women in the first half of the 20th century.
Animated Encounters Jury comments:
This film was incredibly powerful and thought provoking. The perfect combination of a challenging topic presented in a playful style. It’ll be one of those films we will always remember.
Reflective Encounters
“Urška Djukić and Émilie Pigeard’s Granny’s Sexual Life is a harrowing look at how societal expectations of women can produce trauma that spans generations. The film, purportedly narrated from the perspective of someone’s grandmother, takes on a sketchy, stream-of-consciousness style of animation with lines constantly in motion, forming new shapes, new people and new memories at every moment. The frantic animation, paired with the distressing experiences regaled of physical and sexual abuse produces a viewing experience that feels all too raw and intimate.
Within this glimpse into someone’s id, characters are reduced to Freudian symbols: the maternal figure is portrayed as a bloated circle with a visible vagina, popping out children in a house that can barely hold her, while the father militaristically brandishes his cock like a rifle. But the most revealing scenes are the ones that don’t feature animation. Over a black screen, sounds of male pleasure and female anguish are overlaid for a prolonged period. Even then it’s hard to process how awful what we’re witnessing is. If there’s any respite, it’s from the real photos used in montages, starting the film with pictures of women’s hands in subservient positions and ending with their faces, allowing us to see them as independent from the men in their lives, guiding us to come to terms with the pain society has inflicted on them.”
— Matthew Chan
Filmmaker Q&A
A Q&A with filmmakers from the Late Lounge 2 programme at Encounters Film Festival 2021.
Filmmakers - Jayden Rathsam Hua (Sushi Noh) and Urskad Jukic (Granny's Sexual Life)
Hosted by Kieran Argo, Animation Programmer.
Filmmaker Bios
Urška Djukić (1986) studied at the Academy of Arts in Nova Gorica. Her short film Bon Appétit, La Vie! won the award for Best Short at the National Festival of Slovenian Film 2016. In 2018, she was invited to participate at SEE Factory, a joint project for young directors curated by Directors’ Fortnight and Sarajevo Film Festival.
There she co-directed a short film The Right One that was presented within Cannes 2019. The same year she was selected for the 39th Cinéfondation Residence where she continued developing her debut Little Trouble Girls. By combining live-action, animation and various forms of experimental techniques Urška Djukić creates hybrid visual narratives and is especially focused on exploring topics of contemporary womanhood.
Émilie Pigeard was born in 1990 in the French town Les Lilas. She dreamed of becoming either a magician or a lawyer. In the end, after a year at the Sorbonne, she entered the prestigious Arts Décoratifs school in Paris, specializing in Animation.
Alongside painting, illustration and animation, Émilie has a natural flair for storytelling, as well as a great sense of humour. After five years of research, much wordplay and some hard graft, she earned a distinction for her short graduation film Encore un gros lapin which was noticed and produced by Les Films Sauvages. In 2014 Émilie studied at the German Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (HFF) as part of an Erasmus exchange. There she met Anna Bergmann, a German film-maker who shared the same enthusiasm for animated movies. Since then Émilie has been making films as a freelancer in Paris, while continuing to draw and run workshops for kids.