Screenwriting residency

“Not all women are from Venus”

GENESIS OF THE PROJECT

It all began in April 1989, when Marc Gauché, then aged 25 and heartbroken, took refuge in a movie theater to see I married an alien. What could have remained a simple emotional escape becomes the starting point for a decades-long investigation. Facing the screen, her intellectual gaze is awakened: why is Céleste, the extraterrestrial played by Kim Basinger, filmed according to all the codes of “male gaze” theorized by Laura Mulvey? Why this traditional femininity so marked when the genre of E.T. or Klaatu never seemed important?

This initial questioning led Marc Gauché to methodically identify films featuring extraterrestrial women, Voyage to the Moon from Georges Méliès in 1902 until Sci-Fi Vixens from Beyond in 2024. More than 120 years of cinema where these creatures from elsewhere — Selenites, Martians, Venusians — served as a mirror to the fantasies, fears and gendered representations of each era.

WHY ROCABELLA?

Rocabella is not just a simple place to welcome this residence. It is a space that will become an integral part of the documentary itself, through the “artistic punctuations” imagined by director Patrick Foch: “aliens are invading Rocabella” and “micro-portraits outside the walls”. This place of creation will make it possible to anchor the project in a physical and artistic reality, creating a dialogue between theoretical analysis and visual creation.

WHO WILL BE MEETING?

This residency will bring together Marc Gauché, coordinator of the project and the leader of this personal investigation that has become academic, and Patrick Foch, director who will contribute his cinematographic vision and filming equipment.

They will work closely (videoconferences, remote exchanges) with a set of experts carefully selected for their complementary skills: Nathalie Rivière (history of American sci-fi cinema), Marianne Kac-Vergne (reconstruction of masculinity in cinema), Raphaëlle Moine (film genres and women of action), Martine Delvaux (seriality of female representations), Christophe Bier (cinema bis and eroticism on the screen), François Cau (popular movie culture) and Éliane Viennot (history of women and power).

PURPOSE OF THE RESIDENCE

The aim of this residency is to transform several decades of research and thinking into a successful documentary scenario. Marc Gauchee brings his academic background in gender studies and film analysis, his ability to distinguish what belongs to the story of the film, to the narrative position and to the discourse of the authors. Patrick Foch adds his know-how as a director and his visual device.

The challenge is twofold: on the one hand, to structure a complex investigation that questions how cinema has built, through these women from elsewhere, “a hierarchical and essential vision of gender difference”. On the other hand, to create a film object that is both intellectually rigorous and accessible to the general public, capable of reaching those who, as in 1989, are looking in cinemas for answers to their questions about alterity, desire and gender relationships.

The finalized script will then serve as a support for seeking the funding necessary for the production of the documentary. It will convince producers and broadcasters of the originality of the project: to show that these representations of extraterrestrial women, far from being anecdotal, reveal our fantasies, our fears and our ambivalences in the face of female emancipation — creatures that are both submissive and free, at the same time, free, eroticized and threatening, politically incompetent but endowed with extraordinary powers.