Marguerite’s Theorem (Le Théorème de Marguerite) by French director Anna Novion stars Ella Rumpf as Marguerite, a superb arithmetic scholar at France’s high college engaged on fixing Goldbach’s conjecture for her thesis. The movie premiered on the 2023 Cannes Movie Pageant, the place its manufacturing designer Anne-Sophie Delseries received the CST Younger Movie Technician Award because it actually immersed us on this planet of a tormented genius who sees math in all places whereas going by means of a interval of doubt and coming-of-age of types. Anna Novion answered a couple of of our questions in regards to the film and this one-of-a-kind story a couple of uncommon feminine arithmetic Ph.D. struggling to pay lease in Paris.
What impressed you to make this film or inform this story?
Anna Novion: After I begin a movie, I all the time start with a sense, an emotion. I thought of a sense of imprisonment and dislocation that I skilled once I was about 20 years previous. I’d been in poor health and needed to keep at house for six months. After I recovered, I felt very out of contact with the world, with younger folks of my age, with their carefree perspective. After I tried to convey what I had felt, I considered the Ivy League faculties the place younger folks work in a vacuum and are minimize off from the skin world. That’s how I met mathematicians and had an Instrumental assembly with Ariane Mézard, an incredible French mathematician.
“After I begin a movie, I all the time start with a sense, an emotion.”
This assembly utterly guided the writing of the movie and took it to a spot I hadn’t anticipated. The way in which she talked about her job triggered one thing in me as a result of she talked about the whole lot that drives me in my job: the fervour, the need, the problem, the tenacity, the relentlessness… I spotted that there was an actual parallel to be drawn between arithmetic and creative creation. What hyperlinks arithmetic and filmmaking is the chance and fervour meaning we’re typically ready to work for years with out realizing whether or not our work will come to an finish. It grew to become a really private movie that evoked my relationship with creation.
Did you all the time have a lady mathematician in thoughts for the protagonist, or is Marguerite based mostly on an actual individual?
I believe Marguerite is a mix of Ariane Mézard and myself. Ariane Mézard’s tales impressed me lots. She was one of the best and solely lady in her class. I additionally needed to inform the story of what it’s prefer to be a lady in a masculine atmosphere. Even in my career, I’ve felt the stress of feeling like you’re the exception and you must show that you just belong. So, Marguerite sees herself as a form of anomaly, and she or he feels this competitors all of the extra as a result of she’s the one lady.