SECTIONS // RETROSPECTIVE: FERNAND MELGAR

Remue - Ménage (Storm In a C-Cup )

Fernand Melgar
52' / 2002 / Switzerland
French
Spanish subtitled

Pascal looks for the pair of tights that suit him best, then applies his make-up with the helpful advice of his wife Carole. Capturing moments of intimacy and scenes from everyday life, Fernand Melgar spends a year filming this couple battling other people's perceptions of them. Pascal does not hide his need to dress like a woman. He is both a loving father and husband and a woman dreaming of sequins and dance-hall fame. However, this ménage à trois struggles to assert its identity, coming up against attacks from family and jeers from fellow inhabitants of the village. Filmed from the birth of their last child until his first birthday, the film tells the story of bringing to life, of a painful introduction to the world we live in. The sequences, which are always meaningful, follow each other seamlessly: conversations and everyday gestures underline little victories and big disappointments. Childhood photographs, a television programme or a newspaper article...the representation of the true person within is at the heart of the problem. Whether looking in the mirror for shaving or putting on make-up, there is a succession of mirror effects, where one is really looking for oneself or confronting one’s own image and the mask one wears. In Storm in a C-Cup, the impartial eye of the camera reveals ambiguities, little by little bringing questions to light; questions that remain unanswered when the carnival finally arrives, just at the moment when, ironically, all the roles are reversed.

Main Festivals & Awards

2003
“Traces de Vie” Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand – Best Film Award

Director's Biography

Fernand Melgar was born into a family of Spanish unionists exiled to Tangiers (Morocco). His parents smuggled him in with them when, in 1963, they emigrated to Switzerland as seasonal Labourers. In the early eighties, he cut short his business studies in order to found, together with several friends, the Cabaret Orwell in Lausanne, soon a mecca for French-speaking Switzerland’s underground culture; later, he created the internationally renowned rock music venue La Dolce Vita, also in Lausanne. After endowing the latter night spot with a programme of creative video projections, he became a self-taught, freelance film director and producer. In 1983, he began putting together various experimental films and iconoclastic reportages for television. In 1985 he joined Climage*, a collective to which he belongs to this day, and with whom he produced around a dozen documentaries, now considered as benchmarks on the topics of immigration and identity. His documentary Exit –The Right to Die has garnered several international awards, including the prestigious 2006 EBU Golden Link Award for the Best European Co-Production, and the 2006 Swiss Film Prize. Winner of the screenplay competition launched by Télévision Suisse Romande (French-speaking Switzerland’s broadcasting centre) in 2007, Melgar is currently working on his first fiction feature film, Far Behind the Mountain. He lives and works in Lausanne.

*Created in 1985, Climage groups together several individualists who have similar ideas on independent and engaged filmmaking. Today, Climage has become one of Frenchspeaking Switzerland’s most prolific producers of documentaries.

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