Following its selection for Un Certain Regard at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and four Cesar nominations (French equivalent of the Oscars), Contender Home Entertainment will release the ethereally beautiful (The Observer) Water Lilies on DVD on 7 July 2008.
This elegant, erotic film about love is a provocative and stylish drama (The Guardian) and is the outstanding directorial debut from twenty-seven year-old Céline Sciamma and stars newcomers Pauline Acquart, Louise Blachère, Adèle Haenel and Warren Jacquin.
Set in the competitive world of synchronised swimming, Water Lilies is a brilliantly observed portrait of female adolescence.
The film revolves around three 15-year-old girls who experience first love in very different ways. It’s summer in a new suburb outside Paris with nothing to do but look at the ceiling. Marie, Anne and Floriane are 15.
Their paths cross in the corridors at the local swimming pool, where love and the violence of desire erupts for the first time, bringing them together and tearing them apart.
Sukhdev Sandhu of The Daily Telegraph described the film as havingsharp, engaging performances, and that it recalls other outstanding debuts: Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love and Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.
Premiering at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard, Sciamma and her young cast were widely hailed as among the most talented newcomers to emerge from the festival with The Independent hailing Sciamma as a filmmaker to watch.
Céline Sciamma grew up in the suburbs and after a masters degree in French literature, she was admitted to La Femis where she took screenwriting courses and wrote Water Lilies for her studies and someone on her graduation committee urged Sciamma to make it into a film. The film is the winner of the Junior Best Screenplay Award 2006.
She divides her work between collaborations with directors and writing features and television projects.