“When I was a child, photographers came to take pictures of us at breakfast”

“This photograph of my mother, pregnant with me, was taken by my uncle, Andrew Birkin. Clearly very shortly before I was born. No doubt in England. It moves me to know that I’m inside. It’s an intimate photo, but the images of my childhood blur between those that were private and those that appeared in the press. When I was a child, photographers came to take pictures of us at breakfast, we were often watched by others. Even my mom’s super-eight movies have been released. So, in my memories, everything is linked.

“An animal bond”

Being an adult also means detaching yourself from your childhood and your parents. Mine being very well known, I had a particular path. I didn’t want to be compared or overly scrutinized. Besides, when I went to live in New York for six years, I realized that it was probably also to detach myself from it. Today, back in Paris, I immerse myself in this story. A story that, sometimes, some specialists know better than me …

In the coming months, I will be opening a museum dedicated to my father, rue de Verneuil. And I made a documentary about my mother. It was I who put these two projects on my back unconsciously, right on my return. With this film, I wanted to show the bond between a mother and her daughter. I asked myself the question of using archival images. But that would have come back to putting her in the context of an era, that would have been, again, necessarily associating her with my father. I didn’t want to go into that. It is the intimate relationship between two people that interested me, an animal bond and which is felt very gently in this image. “