Trama

This film is a gift. A gift for a lady. For Adrienne. She is seventy-seven, the age limit for reading Tintin comics. One evening she invited me to dinner, and at the end of the meal she began to recite a Persian folk tale. I told her that I'd like to come and film it the following week. She thought I was joking, because people had been telling her that for years and no-one had ever come back. But this time, what was said was done. The tale was filmed from beginning to end, as was the music, Iranian of course. The musician, a highly talented professional, came specially from Paris to Brussels for the event. After this, I filmed Adrienne a lot, and she is featured in several of my films. The time came when I wanted to make a film-portrait of her: Adrienne from A to Z. It was shot last summer in a matter of days - It could also have been called 'My Life is a Tale'. The film contains seven lessons plus a few digressions. 1. Swimming lesson. 2. Driving lesson. 3. Cooking lesson. 4. Sewing lesson. 5. Botany lesson. 6. Savoir-vivre lesson. 7. Cinema lesson. Adrienne lived in Iran for 14 years, with her husband, a surgeon working in the holy city of Meshed. When he died, she returned to Brussels to be near her children and grandchildren. Having learnt Persian and actively collected and translated the folk tales of the province of Khorasan, she finally put some of the Orient and a lot of sun in her story-telling.—Berlinale Forum