The second day of the Seville European Film Festival vibrated with the adrenaline-pumping Rodeo, the feature film debut of the French Lola Quivoron, a director who loves action and who aims high with the story of a young marginal girl passionate about the motorcycles. The film starts with a sequence shot in which Julia argues with her brother in the corridors of the center where they live. She is pure fire and she is very nervous. She dedicates herself to stealing motorcycles when she meets with a salesman to try them out. "I was born with a motorcycle between my legs," she says proudly. In that complex balance between accelerator and brake, that girl with a haggard look and curly hair screams free in a world that has turned its back on her.
It doesn't take long for her to meet a gang of wheeled stunt fans who initially look down on her and then become partners in dealing, repairing, selling and stealing parts for a guy in jail. In a clandestine universe dominated by testosterone, Julia will try to find a home. Quivoron entered the world of urban rodeos seven years ago and does not believe that it is a place closed to women, "but there are few of them," she says in an interview with this newspaper. Her experience has nothing to do with what the story conveys, since "it's all fiction and I felt welcome because I was a photographer and I made several short films and I've written papers for bikers", but it has allowed her to distance herself and create all the mythology that makes up Rodeo.
He acknowledges that there is implicit in it "a violence that comes from the patriarchy" and that he has not wanted to make a documentary about motocross on asphalt, something that he is passionate about. “The film arises from a personal movement and from my meeting with Julie Ledru, the protagonist, who is based on a biker girl I met one summer and who disappeared”. The director wanted to follow "the ghost" of that young woman and she found her three years before making the film in the figure of Ledru while she was doing searches on Instagram.
“Julie called herself Unknown 95 and I was interested in her provocative and irreverent attitude because she would put the motorcycle inside her room and cover her face. We met and for me it was a miracle because she personifies that dream that she had of the character”. For Julie, who like Julia has also experienced social stigma because of her origin and her skin -her family is from Guadalupe-, it was a kind of shock to talk to Lola about her role. “It couldn't be that there was so much coincidence. To this day we still talk about that mystique that she created for herself”, she comments with a smile.
Winner of the jury's crush award for the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, Rodeo has left a great sensation in the official section, which also includes Scarlet , by Pietro Marcello, who already won the Golden Giraldillo in 2019 for Martin Eden. She now freely adapts the story The Red Sailboat, by Alexander Grin, into a beautiful fable that explores parental and filial love while exploring the power of women and the artistic struggle of the proletariat.
“When I read it, I fell in love with that story. And in particular the story of his father caught my attention, that relationship he has with his daughter, which seemed very modern to me, with that idea of the extended family. Because, ultimately, this story has a close relationship for me with Miracle in Milan -a film by Vittorio de Sica-, in the sense that both deal with a group of people rejected by a majority and who, despite everything, are capable of create a community where shelter. A cinematographic craftsman, Marcello presents the viewer with a poetic work that is at the same time a fairy tale and a witch tale.
