Feature Documentary Film
TOTAL BUDGET
US $110,000
CONFIRMED FINANCING
US $83,000
CONTACTS
mina_nabil@gmail.com
+20 1228863456
mark@figleafstudios.com
+20 1221172554
In a male-dominated industry, she was the ultimate career woman.
I Am a Script Girl tells of the personal journey of Sylvette Baudrot, who spent 67 years behind the camera, working the same job as a script supervisor, creating a filmography of more than 120 films, with some of the world’s leading directors and actors. She’s enjoying her late eighties by going to the cinema every day, watching at least two or three films with each visit, remembering her childhood and career through films, and talking with people about what they can’t find in film history books.
Sylvette is an immigrant who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1928. She lived there until 1944, when she turned 16. She immigrated after the Second World War, crossing the Mediterranean on the first cargo ship from Alexandria to Paris, France with her younger sister, just one year her minor, aiming to start a new life. Her life was mysterious, full of big names and great stories.
She got an opportunity to work as a second unit script supervisor with Alfred Hitchcock in To Catch a Thief (1955). Because of her connection with Hitchcock, she started becoming well-known in France, especially after François Truffaut asked her to write an article for the Cahiers du Cinéma about her experience of working with Hitchcock on set at that time. Sylvette wrote the article which sparked Truffaut, who later grew closer to Hitchcock and created the renowned 40-hour interview of Hitchcock.
Making a film about films is delicate, especially after watching great ultimate films and directors. It is simple for Sylvette to talk, but to visualize the archive was an early challenge for this project. One of the results of the journey, as we have it now, is to produce I Am a Script Girl, because it affects the filmmakers.
We will be working on this film based on what we share from the understanding of our jobs through giants, who stepped on the film history stairs long before many of us, more than 60 years ago. Hiroshima mon Amour - Using the scripts, negatives, Polaroids, letters, and photos we will create a parallel world based on these elements. Specifically, it is just a simple breakdown of the layers of Sylvette’s life, such as moving through the scripts and seeing the differences between the typewriter letters and Sylvette’s notes, with pencil beneath it, and so on. It is a way to break the usual logic of expressing archive material in documentaries; we choose to create a world of the archive that can be a mysterious and entertaining visual medium.
Presenting a creative documentary portrait leads us not to use the original films, not just because of the film rights, but by using Sylvette’s unseen archive we can cover the film and tell the story, giving the film a sense of originality and a zone to dive in through interviews with all the protagonists, then project those to form a special language through sound and visuals.
As a producer, I’m interested in the aspect of using the documentary films that document the history of cinema, thus conceiving the broader socio-political history, which was the topic of a previous project of mine as a producer, called I Have a Picture. Both projects intersect in some aspects and take off into different directions. I Am a Script Girl scrutinizes and unfolds the generational consciousness in the industry, not as a nostalgic process, but as trying to grasp the present moment in the experience-loaded light of the past and the chain links in between. This happens through the qualitative lens of gender analysis: Sylvette is a woman who has worked in a demanding and harsh job, which she has excelled in by studying, self-learning and extreme self-discipline, to become a woman whom all big male names in the domain depended on for her unique organizing skills.
A crucial point the project presents is understanding and analyzing the Egyptian and Arab societies, and the global changes happening, by studying “the other.” The project, by closely studying a Western personality with Arab roots, regains the right to understand one by reflecting on the other. This opens the door for academics and filmmakers to go in the opposite direction: not only Westerners should come to study Alexandria as a part of their history, but also, as Mina is doing here, Alexandrians can study Europe as part of their personal and local heritage.
2016: Cheerful Giver
2015: Expired
2015: Under the Pyramid
2015:The Visit
2015: Dream Away
2015: Ramady
2015: I Have a Picture
2014: Al Araba Al Madfuna II
2013: Mice Room
2012: Ahlam
2011: Microphone
2008: Atef