18/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: The French filmmaker reveals the ingredients for his very own personal recipe for a “dramedy” travelling from the French Jura to Greenland

Unveiled in the 75th Berlinale’s Panorama line-up,  The Incredible Snow Woman [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sébastien Betbeder
film profile] is Sébastien Betbeder’s 9th feature film.

Cineuropa: Almost ten years after Journey to Greenland [+see also:
trailer
interview: Frédéric Dubreuil
film profile], this territory is reappearing in your new film. What is it about this region that appeals to you?
Sébastien Betbeder: It wasn’t the main reason for making the film, but it had a huge impact on the choice I made in the writing phase. After my first experience there, I really wanted to return to Greenland, I felt like I’d only scraped the surface of what that territory is really all about, in other words its inhabitants. I’m not a big adventurer by any means, but it was a necessity for me, almost an addiction, because it’s a territory which is so different from what I’m familiar with, going back there was like unravelling a mystery again.

What kind of mystery would you like to unravel this time?
It relates to an interest which is actually the driving force of this film: portraying a character who’s facing death - which is revealed pretty quickly in the film - and thinking about this finiteness in a territory like Greenland, which is at variance with the more western reflections which we’re familiar with.

Why did you opt for the character of a female explorer?
I wanted to paint the portrait of a woman and for a female character to be at the heart of one of my films, which I’d never done before. I also wanted to move closer towards some sort of radicality, to go against the tide a little, because when we think of adventure and exploration, we automatically tend to associate them with men. I wanted to confront a female character with survival challenges and finding her place in the world, which I don’t feel I’ve seen very much of in films or in literature.

This story about a woman is also the story of a family.
I knew fairly early on that the film would be composed of two parts: one set in France close to the mountains and a second in Greenland, which is where the character’s journey would take her. There’s also something that’s been really important to me in all my films: the subject of family and, on this occasion, siblings. So when it came to the character of Coline, there was a need for her to reconnect with her brothers. I developed the film as a kind of test for her: she had to face up to her family to be really sure of her place in the world.

You choose to explore these really serious and dramatic themes from a comedic viewpoint which you’re quick to push pretty far. Why is this?
I totally accept that the film’s a comedy, even if I do really like the term "dramedy". The more films I make, the more I believe in the idea that comedy is the best way to tackle serious subjects. I wanted to go a little further than usual in this film; I knew all throughout the writing process that I was on a precipice, but I had to keep to this precipice because I was convinced that that was the film’s strength. Clearly, it’s a film about death, but I wanted it to be bright, and humour was crucial to getting audiences to accept Coline’s journey. I struggle to think of films as belonging to just one genre, whether comedy or drama, and I think we feel a sense of familiarity with the interstices between the two.

Isn’t difference the real crux of the film, along the lines of the Inuit people’s qivittoq?
The qivittoq is a fantastical entity, a lot like a yeti, but it also refers to marginalised people who aren’t accepted by society and who, a bit like animism, turn into animals and blend into the background. Metaphorically speaking, it fitted perfectly with what I wanted to do with the character of Coline, a character who could be seen as quite naive and borderline in the first part of the film, but who actually has the most accurate ideas about existence, in my opinion.

What were your main intentions with the film’s visuals?
My director of photography and I saw lots of films from the ‘70s, especially humanist-style westerns: there’s a direct quote from Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man in the film, but I was also thinking about Robert Altman’s John McCabe, westerns set in the snow. Then I had to make sure there was continuity between the film’s first part in France, in the Jura region, and its second part in Greenland, with a far smaller, almost documentarian team.

(Translated from French)