By Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier

When writer-director Céline Sciamma reflects on the making of Tomboy in 2010, she describes a world that looks and feels markedly different from today's. Set in the Paris suburbs – albeit a fictional, deliberately undefined landscape of housing blocks and woodland – the film arrived at a moment when cinema's engagement with gender identity was almost non-existent.

Yet, for Sciamma, specifics were never meant to be the point. "Not everybody knows about the sea, not everybody knows about the mountains," she says, referring to children of lower socio-economic backgrounds. "Everybody knows about the forest." The setting, then, was chosen as a kind of fable: democratic and essentially timeless, a place where a child could discover themselves freely.

The production itself was an act of liberation. Tomboy was written in a matter of weeks and shot two months later in just twenty days, with a crew of fourteen and the then-new Canon 7D camera, one of the first narrative films to use this consumer filmmaking tool.

For Sciamma, the modest scale was not a limitation but a dynamic challenge to the usual protocols of how films are made. "The fact that it had such an impact when it was made, on such a modest budget, was very liberating for me," she reflects today. "It is actually still something I am inspired by, as I'm trying to do cinema more. The film that inspires me the most to believe in that practice, is still Tomboy."

Sciamma remains cautious, however, to resist the labels that often accompany such first-time successes. "I am not comfortable with this idea of pioneering," she says of her impact of gender-fluid narrative film, "because it makes us start all over again." She prefers to locate herself within a longer continuum of queer representation, acknowledging that cinema "has been not very generous towards the character mirroring our experience."

As such, stories like Tomboy were rare at the dawn of the 2010s. Over 15 years later, Sciamma's own politics and awareness have evolved, a change due in part to how deeply Tomboy has continued to resonate with trans children. "The fact that the film can grow with us in time, and that it can be more inclusive fifteen years later,” she says, “is very important to me."

When Tomboy first screened at the Berlinale in 2011, as the opening film of the festival’s Panorama segment, the response was immediate. "They opened another room because there were so many people showing up," Sciamma remembers warmly. The film began selling to international distributors soon after these first screenings.

Beyond this, Tomboy went on to win the TEDDY Jury Award in 2012, and with it came something Sciamma had not anticipated: a global community. Travelling with the film, meeting queer distributors across Europe, the director found a network that still sustains her artistic practice today.

Sciamma places particular weight on what the TEDDY represents outside its parameters as just a film prize, highlighting the importance of its role as an ongoing archive. Indeed, the TEDDY AWARD film archive remains one of cinema's oldest continuous records of queer work.

"It took only a few weeks for the Trump administration to try to shut down even our indexation [of ‘LGBTQ’ searches]," she says. "The TEDDY archive is a very important one, and one I feel good belonging to."

In the years since, Sciamma's profile has grown considerably, with numerous BAFTA, Golden Globes and César award nominations to her name. Yet with greater recognition came greater power, as well as the deliberate choice to interrogate that power.

"When you have power, you have to stop," she says, "and ask yourself what you're going to do with it." Rather than pursue larger budgets and wider reach, Sciamma has spent the past four years teaching at cinema schools across Europe, working closely with emerging filmmakers. "Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is stop," she reiterates.

What Sciamma has observed in the new generation surprises her. Where filmmakers of her era feared their work would never be made, today's young creators contend with a different anxiety surrounding an industry that will compromise their vision. "The new generation is afraid that this industry will hurt their ideas," she explains.

Her advice is to shelter the work in the writing process, to find an intellectual community before exposing a script to financiers, and to resist the pressure of industry labs and development pipelines that can adversely modify a film's messaging.

She distils it into one quietly radical instruction: "You have to green-light yourself first. Don’t put your ideas too soon in the hands of the people who will give you the green light, because sometimes the cost of making something happen is that it will happen in a way that can be a destructive. It’s very hard to conceive a different path within an industry,” she concludes, “especially if you choose softness – and we should. We are soft, you know; that’s what we are.”