Belgium - French Premiere

A comme Adrienne

Adrienne is not my mother. She is not Jewish.
She is 77, the age limit for reading Tintin comics.
I met her five years ago, at Edouard's, where I'd gone to ask my friend to lend me a dinner jacket for the premiere of my film Life Lessons, at the Brussels Opera House. She came to see the film, and then saw others, and we began to meet often.
One evening she invited me to dinner, and at the end of the meal she began to recite a Persian folk tale. I told her that I'd like to come and film it the following week.
Adrienne lived in Iran for fourteen years, with her husband, a surgeon working in the holy city of Meshed. When he died, she returned to Brussels to be near her children and grandchildren.
Having learnt Persian and actively collected and translated the folk tales of the province of Khorasan, she finally put some of the Orient in her pocket and a lot of sun in her storytelling. Filmmaking may have changed Adrienne's life, but Adrienne has certainly worked at changing mine.
The film ends with a folk tale. An episodic tale, like "Thousand And One Nights." The whole film leads up to it. But isn't Adrienne's whole life a tale?

Filmography:
1995-1997: Mes entretiens filmés
1998: Le Voyage à Moscou
1999: L'Image, le Monde
1999: Voyage au pays de ma mère
1999: Le Rat botté (Mes sept lieux)
1999-2000: Histoire de ma vie racontée par mes photographies