From her early work in editing with Abdellatif Kechiche to directing Fragile and Animale, Emma Benestan is shaping a cinema attentive to faces, bodies and places. In this interview, she discusses her search for emotion, her rapport with Oulaya Amamra and her desire to subvert genre conventions.
From the editing room to the film set, Emma Benestan has gradually found her place in French cinema. Her career alongside Abdellatif Kechiche, her enduring rapport with actor Oulaya Amamra and her attentiveness to performers all inform a singular body of work. From Fragile to Animale, the director explores genres in order to reshape their rules, while grounding her stories in specific places.
From editing to directing: learning to find her place
Before directing her own films, Emma Benestan studied editing at La Fémis. She then worked on several of Abdellatif Kechiche’s films, including Blue Is the Warmest Color and Mektoub My Love. This first step suited her: she could support the creative process, think about the rhythm of images and take part in discussions about acting, without being in the foreground.
She had long been drawn to cinema, but the idea of making it her profession did not come naturally. Coming from a family far removed from the industry, she did not immediately feel entitled to enter it. That confidence grew gradually, through experience, but also thanks to a generation of filmmakers who were moving forward together. Friendships and shared projects provided tangible support: seeing one of their films come to fruition encouraged the others to keep going.
Editing, a school of rhythm and faces
Working with Kechiche taught her to give performers more freedom. Rather than imposing a fixed intention on them, she learned the importance of observing their energy, their presence and what their gestures convey. Editing also taught her how to experience a scene beyond the dialogue: watching faces without sound, or listening to music on its own, can reveal whether a sequence has a movement of its own. The search for an inner pulse remains at the heart of her practice.
Oulaya Amamra, a rapport that began on a short film
Alongside her editing work, Benestan began directing short films. Among other things, she wanted to offer a different perspective on university life, an ambition that runs through the writing of Belle gueule. She met Oulaya Amamra through the 1000 Visages association, at the start of their collaboration.
The director was not necessarily looking for an actress who would become a muse. The meeting instead sparked an obvious creative connection, one that would be renewed from film to film. Since then, Amamra has been a creative partner and a valued ally, with whom she has developed a deeper artistic relationship over the years.
This loyalty does not mean repeating the same formula. Each role calls for a new exploration and a different way of building the character. On the contrary, the trust between actress and director makes it possible to take risks, try unexpected paths and leave room for whatever emerges during preparation or filming.
Casting actors for what they can bring to a role
For each film, casting begins with a question: what kind of presence does the story need in order to take root? Choosing a performer is not just about checking whether they match a character imagined on the page. It is also about discovering what they can bring to the role, sometimes beyond the screenwriter’s original intentions.
Auditions and rehearsals play an essential role in this search. They offer time to identify a way of speaking, an energy or a sensibility that gives the role a new dimension. An actor can add depth where the script seemed to have already charted a clear direction.
This attentiveness sometimes leads her to favor inexperienced, little-known performers or those unfamiliar with the profession. Their presence can lend the story a particular authenticity, provided the right person is found—someone who understands its world intimately. For Fragile, the director particularly wanted the conversations about bulls to ring true and remain faithful to the place depicted.
Collective preparation then becomes a filmmaking tool. Before shooting this film, the actors spent time together, rehearsing and taking part in shared activities. Getting to know one another helped them build a shared ease that benefited both their dialogue and their physical interactions.
Reshaping genre conventions without losing sight of the characters
Emma Benestan’s influences span very different worlds, from fantasy television to arthouse cinema. For Fragile, for instance, she had works as different as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Claude Sautet’s films in mind. In Animale, she brings the western into conversation with body horror and mythological motifs associated with the Minotaur.
These influences are not there to reproduce established models. The director is more interested in how a genre shapes the audience’s expectations, and then in what it becomes when its rules are changed. The romantic comedy of Fragile and the western of Animale offer her recognizable frameworks that she can transform profoundly.
She often seeks to bring codes perceived as highly feminine or masculine into tension. This shift opens up space to tell stories differently about relationships, desires or power dynamics. Genre remains present, but it does not dictate the film’s meaning on its own.
Beyond formal influences, it is the characters that connect very different works. Filmmakers she admires, such as Alfonso Cuarón and Steven Spielberg, can move from one register to another without losing their own sensibility. What interests her is how their stories follow individuals confronting their communities, their fears and their aspirations.
Making place a presence on screen
In Benestan’s films, no setting is interchangeable. Sète, oyster farming and the world of television production give Fragile a distinctive texture, while the horses and landscapes of the Camargue are integral to the identity of Animale. These places are more than backdrops: they shape the characters and the way their stories unfold.
The director feels a strong attachment to the South, which she knows through Montpellier and Sète. Living in Paris has also given her some distance from the often-simplified depictions of the region, reduced to sun-drenched images or the French Riviera. She wants to film more tangible places, with their activities, habits and contradictions.
This approach involves an unapologetically local grounding. In her view, a story can grow out of a place with which it has a deep connection, to the point that setting it somewhere else would change its nature. Geographical and social details then contribute directly to the narrative and its emotional impact.
The landscape thus becomes a sensory extension of the characters. In a western, for example, the vast expanse can reflect inner tensions as much as the relationships between the inhabitants. This way of thinking about setting helps the director make emotional states visible without explaining them solely through dialogue.
Her ambition is to carry the intimate and the particular into a broader experience. The aim is not to erase a place’s distinctive qualities in order to make the story universal. On the contrary, a story can resonate far beyond its borders by staying close to a place, its voices and its gestures.
Emma Benestan first built her career in the shadows of editing rooms. Trained at La Fémis, she worked alongside Abdellatif Kechiche on Blue Is the Warmest Color and Mektoub, My Love. This experience taught her to pay particular attention to faces, gestures and what performers express beyond dialogue. For her, a scene can reveal its full power when watched without sound, allowing the subtle variations in an expression or a presence to emerge.
As a director, she continues this exploration by giving actors an essential role. Casting is not just about finding someone who matches a character already written; it is also about discovering what the performer can bring to the role that is unexpected. Auditions, rehearsals and time spent together before filming all inform this approach. In Fragile, for instance, the group preparation allows the actors to create a shared dynamic and inhabit their roles with greater freedom.
Her filmmaking is also grounded in a dialogue with genres. Romantic comedy and the western become territories to explore and reshape, rather than models to reproduce. In Animale, western conventions meet body horror and a mythological figure, while the story takes root in the landscapes of the Camargue. This formal freedom remains tied to the characters, their desires, their fears and their relationship with the world around them.
Places, too, occupy a central role in her cinema. Sète and the Camargue are not mere settings: their activities, landscapes and communities are part of the very substance of the stories. By starting from a specific place and an intimate experience, Benestan seeks to evoke emotions that everyone can relate to, without erasing what makes each story profoundly singular.
