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Locarno-bound title “Small Talk,” a doc-fiction portrait of the power dynamics at play among the daughters of the world’s social elite, has been picked up for international sales by the Frédéric Corvez led Urban Sales.
The Paris-based sales agency will bring “Small Talk” to market at Switzerland’s Locarno Festival where it was announced Thursday as part of Filmmakers of the Present.
A Locarno world premiere, “Small Talk” is directed by Geneva-based Mateo Ybarra and produced by Madeline Robert, both leading lights of the Swiss doc scene thanks in part to the roles at Visions du Réel.
Ybarra’s prior film, “Over the Hills,” examined masculinity in the Swiss Army. “Small Talk” continues his interrogation of Swiss institutions by examining another facet of Swiss identity: the education of women.
In it, Charlie, played by French actress Hélène Bares (“Evy & Me”), arrives at the real-life Villa Pierrefou in the hills above Lake Geneva, Switzerland’s last surviving finishing school, to attend a six-week summer course. The weighty cost, €30,000 ($35,000), means the students are near entirely from the world’s social elite.
Charlie, however, is of far humbler social origins. The blue jacket she wears for her first day of school is just too loud, too glam. Her head gestures are far too expressive. While Charlie talks about moving to Dubai for work, other students say they’re planning a trip to Paris for shopping. Over the course of the film, often during small talk, other students try to mentor Charlie on how to fit in.
“This is exactly what we look for when we acquire a film: something singular, here in its form, its raw realism, its lead character, yet with the kind of appeal that travels internationally,” said Urban Sales’ Garance Targowla. “At its center is an institution that fascinates as much as it repels, and that tension is what stayed with us long after the film ended.”
“Through feedback, corrections, and well-intentioned advice, her ways of being are subtly questioned and reshaped. Polishing, here, reveals its quiet violence: a process of adjustment that operates through care rather than constraint,” said Ybarra.
“At Villa Pierrefeu, “small talk” is not trivial conversation but a rigorously taught tool for navigating elite codes,” he added. “The film treats small talk as a site where norms, hierarchies, and power relations are enacted.” A doc fiction, “Small Talk” is often cinema. Bares acts consummately. Charlie doesn’t know how how to sit on a seat. She doesn’t even know how to hold a pen. In the film’s central character arc, she also grates increasingly against the other students’ assumption that their world and they as well are implicitly and innately superior.
The pressure on students – they take 216 hours of classes, 45 exams for a diploma in international etiquette – is conveyed in choice overhead camera shots of them toiling up a hillside to the Villa.
“Ultimately, ‘Small Talk’ asks what an institution like Villa Pierrefeu can still reveal today about gender, class, and power,” Ybarra concluded.
Europe’s biggest mid-summer film meet, the Locarno Film Festival runs Aug. 5-15.
