As artists gathered for Miu Miu’s Tales & Tellers program during Art Basel Paris, conversations about truth and reality rose to the forefront. This year’s inaugural event brought together directors and talent who have participated in Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales and/or collaborated with the fashion brand. The second panel on Oct. 16 featured Chloë Sevigny, Janicza Bravo, Chui Mui Tan, Meriem Bennani, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg in conversation with moderator Sophia Al Maria.
After sharing stories from their childhood that influenced them personally and professionally – For Sevigny, “The Wizard of Oz” served as an example of how to find chosen family, and for Al Maria, “Robin Hood” demonstrated that every villain is the hero of his or her own story – the discussion quickly turned to perspective.
Al Maria recalled a story from her youth, when her American friends were trapped inside the Church of Nativity during a siege in the early aughts. “They witnessed the death of a Palestinian by [a drone]. I had never heard the word ‘drone’ before. It was 2002 and the first time I’d heard of ‘drone’ was in ‘Star Wars.’ But [the news] reported it as ‘shot in a crossfire,’” said Al Maria. “That was my big moment of questioning the truth, and also one’s own position and beliefs about what one is doing or how one moves through the world.”
To demonstrate the fragility of truth, Tan told an allegory of blind men touching an elephant, each coming away with a different perception of the animal based on the part of the body they came in contact with. “I don’t believe there is such a thing as truth, it’s always, ‘Who is the authority?” she said. “It’s all real. It’s all true. The only mistake you can make is thinking what you perceive is the only truth. That would be wrong.”
Meanwhile, Sevigny shared that, even in her personal life, truth is not a finite thing. “I definitely have relationships – very close, maybe even family relationships – where I am very much the villain. And I struggle with that,” the actor said. “I’ve done work in therapy – a little role reversal, which is really fun, to find the answers and the truth and get closer to who this person might think you are.”
As a filmmaker, Sevigny has also experimented with bending the truth – or choosing a perspective – to fit her storytelling. “I made a short film named ‘White Echo.’ It’s a story about a woman grappling with her powers and I got it around this seance and lifted a lot of dialogue from my friends. That’s always kind of a tricky thing,” she says. “That event happened, and it was the truth, but I was bending it to tell my own story.’”
As a composer, Berg expressed his discomfort with tricking an audience into the right state of mind. “It feels manipulative, it doesn’t feel right,” he said. “You know it will probably be successful but it feels terrible inside, because you’re lying.”
His artistic partner, Djurberg, pointed out that there is truth in those emotions as well. “Creative work is having to stay with your emotions,” she said. “Am I staying with the truth of me? That is the truth you have to stay in – with the feelings that you’re generating in yourself. Even if you would manipulate it in a way that wasn’t true to you, you have to stay with the feelings of that – the going against yourself. That is the truth.”
As the conversation neared its conclusion, Bennani noted that her biggest concern is when storytellers conflate truth with sincerity. “The second you frame something, you’re already choosing what you’re showing, and there is nothing more artificial than storytelling in documentary filmmaking because you have to build a story,” she said. “In order to build reality, you have to create fiction, and I don’t think it’s bad. If you’re exposing the fact that you’re a director with an opinion, there is nothing wrong with that. There is a contract to that story.”
