Cannes Film Festival 2021: The Braves (Directors’ Fortnight) | Interview of Anaïs Volpé

We sat down with director Anaïs Volpé who presented The Braves (Entre les vagues), her second feature film at the 2021 Directors’ Fortnight, starring Déborah Lukumuena and Souheila Yacoub.

We were delighted to meet Anaïs Volpé, a self-taught French filmmaker who enjoys mixing arts and exploring new ways of narrations in cinema, as evidenced by her first feature film, Heis (2016) – which was presented at the IFF Rotterdam and Bordeaux’s FIFIB to name but a few – which was part of a larger cross media project.

In the wake of the success of her first feature, which took home the Best World Fiction Feature Film prize from the 2016 LA Film Festival, Anaïs Volpé stated imagining, as soon as 2017, the story of The Braves, dealing with a powerful friendship between two aspiring theater actresses, ending up grappling with life’s ups and downs.

Four years later, director Anaïs Volpé presented The Braves (Entre les vagues) at the 2021 Directors’ Fortnight. The World Premiere of the film will remain among our highlights of our experience at the 74th Cannes Film Festival, thanks to the presence, in the Théâtre Croisette, of the film’s cast who discovered the film for the first time. The intensity of the film, coupled with the emotion of the two main actresses (Souheila Yacoub and Déborah Lukumuena) discovering the feature for the first time, among the audience, ended up being the perfect ingredients for a memorable and powerful collective cinematic experience.

As the synopsis points out, in The Braves (Entre les vagues), Margot and Alma are two best friends holding on to the energy of their youth and their burning desire to conquer the world, until life gets in the way. But their ride-or-die friendship can get them through anything; they are inseparable, unstoppable.

We were lucky to sit down with director Anaïs Volpé to chat about the screening of The Braves, its genesis and making, in a very insightful conversation.