"Elle" is the debut feature by Mexican director Nicole Vanden Broeck, a piece that won the Grand Prize Marlyn Mason Award (Photo courtesy of NIcole Vanden Broeck)
(CNN Spanish) -
Imagine that you are 16 years old and you begin to feel something more for your best friend, but you are about to move to a new city.
That is the central premise of the short film “Elle” by the young French-Mexican filmmaker Nicole Vanden Broeck, who recently won the Grand Prize Marlyn Mason Award from the Rhode Island International Film Festival, which recognizes the new voices and perspectives of women in film. .
The short film tells a fragment of the life of Elle, a teenager who falls in love with her best friend: “Elle is a 16-year-old teenager growing up in the 90s in a city south of Los Angeles.
It is set in that decade because at that time California was not so open to homosexuality, unlike today.
Elle grows up in this small town, surrounded by shyness and with various barriers to define who she is.
Adolescence has always caught my attention.
All this time I have worked with children and adolescents because that is when we are forming.
From the first love and you do not know what happens in your life and you wonder if it is a close friendship, if you like women, if Sam is special.
She's exploring, ”says Nicole Vanden Broeck.
“Elle” was the final project of her Master of Fine Arts from the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles.
This drama explores the intimacy and ambivalence that exists within the friendship and relationship between Elle and Sam, as Vanden Broeck comments: “The line between friendship and love catches my attention, it can be very thin and blurred.
I have found myself in this line in various situations with friends and friends.
If I start to feel close to someone, then you share many things and a lot of intimacy and when we share we ask ourselves many things.
I was struck by addressing this issue and moving from a city is something that I had to live when I moved from Cancun to Mexico City, at age 14, and everything that I experienced and what the two protagonists live is something that I wanted to express ”.
Nicole defines the character of Elle as "sensitive" and the short film as "vulnerable."
This short film is not yet available to the public, until its cycle of screenings at various festivals ends.
Soon she will participate in the “Hola México Film Festival” in Los Angeles, California and in the LGBTQ film festival “Out on Film” in Atlanta.
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