Actor Ariane Labed on Her Debut Feature ‘September Says’ at Cannes

Ariane Labed simply describes herself as European.

Herein is the most concise and expansive way to encompass a career with many footholds, a professional path that kicked off in Greece — where Labed became the emblematic star of the early 2010’s Greek Weird Wave — before winding towards American indie fare from the likes of Richard Linklater, followed by lead roles on primetime French dramas.

The road now leads to Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, where Labed premieres her feature directorial debut, “September Says,” a sisterhood fable with gothic overtones backed by Irish and British producers.
As a storyteller, she says, “questions of belonging and place innately appeal to me.” But when defining herself, “labels of country and language don’t matter at all.”

Instead, Labed finds greater interest in how people live — exploring modern life and rites of passage first as a performer in the bone-dry and bemused films of Athina Rachel Tsangari and Yorgos Lanthimos (with whom Labed has been married since 2013), and now with her own directorial work, which follows a pair of close-knit sisters as they confront teenage bullying, family trauma and nascent romance through an unhealthy codependency.

“[I like art] that pushes normal circumstances to become disturbing, supernatural, and somewhat detached from reality,” she explains. “Because we all need to create our own languages and codes in order to survive. We must find ways to express ourselves beyond words in order to function.”

And so she is equally interested in how people move, stemming from her own training as a dancer as much for her physically dynamic and explosive lead roles in “Attenberg” and the French ballet series “L’Opéra” as for her directorial debut’s comparatively calmer mise-en-scene.

“Camera movement is a form of choreography,” she explains. “And anything to do with movement should be very sparing and very precise. I’d rather focus on the actors in full than to cut them up in close-up or with camera swings. I’m interested in human communication, and for that, I find it way more interesting to see a body moving through space.”

Shot on a mix of 16mm and 35mm stock, “September Says” creates a space unmoored in time, offsetting older sartorial styles and interior designs with glimpses of modern tech, all to build a fable-like atmosphere. “None of us are the products of any one period,” says Labed. “We’re all guarantors and bearers of previous generations, accumulations of earlier histories. So I wanted to blur the lines to better explore themes of sex and death and how to live in society — which are all completely timeless.”

If Labed’s aversion to labels extends to her latest work (“You might call it a genre film,” she says, “only I don’t quite understand the concept”) and to her own position on set (“I’m opposed to the idea of the all-powerful auteur because filmmaking is a collective art”) the multi-hyphenate proudly wears the title of feminist.

To that end, Labed co-founded the collective the Actors Association to fight against harassment and to play a more activist role in the French industry, and she continues to lead the charge for intimacy coordinators on a wider, European scale — not only ensuring the practice on her own sets but also sharing such contacts within her wider circle, connecting productions like “Poor Things” and “Kinds of Kindness” to coordinators with whom she’d already worked.

“Employing intimacy coordinators, keeping everyone’s well being taken care of and making sure that we work in a spirit of joy will all inevitably influence the outcome of the film,” she says. “Because working without one is like doing a fight without a stuntman: You’re putting yourself at risk. So I’d like all the young actors starting out today to have that benefit. And I’d like the same for myself — but we’re not there yet.”