Actor Ariane Labed Wants to Explore ‘How People Live’ in Feature Debut, ‘September Says’

variety.com:

Ben Croll 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.