She’s French

Put the word ‘French’ before ‘woman’ and who do you see? The ‘chic’ ideal of fashion and beauty campaigns, the female protagonist of a French film, or the woman written about in endless media articles who has become the subject of dozens of books that sell in their millions around the world?

She’s French asks where this obsession with French women originates and how our thinking about her might be a foreign invention: has the French woman become falsely imprisoned by a myth?

Pitching everyday French women in London and Paris alongside British and French contributors from the worlds of fashion, film, education, politics and journalism, She’s French lays bare our assumptions about ‘la femme française’ and offers more fluid and multifaceted definitions of their identity than the mythology that has come to define them.

Today as populist movements around the world question women’s rights and female identity they are also challenging the nostalgia for the homogenous cultures of the past: in that framework, She’s French makes a timely contribution to the debate about what it is to be a modern woman.

The film alternates interviews with British, French and American cultural and political figures with pairs of real, French women living in London and France reacting to the professional interviewees talking about French women. The ‘real’ French women share their own insights about being French and how they are perceived.

The interviewees and real women consider the origin of the cultural interest in French women (New Wave cinema, fashion, advertising, books and articles) and the conversation between all contributors develops to consider female identity and how the myths about French women have been perpetuated.