Camille already has five albums to her credit and as many Victoires de la Musique awards. With her companion, Clément Ducol, she signed the soundtrack of the film Emilia Perez, by Jacques Audiard, in the running for the Oscars. Four years of work for a film which she says “in love”. At 46, she has just moved to Los Angeles with her family to lead the Oscar campaign. The couple has just been nominated in several categories for the Golden Globes.
I wouldn’t have gotten here if…
…If there hadn’t been so many severed ties in my family history. I have Jewish origins on my mother’s side, so I carry the memory of racism, anti-Semitism, exclusion. My father was abandoned at birth: there is therefore a very strong break. My need to share comes from there. Music for me is about creating connections.
The extraordinary personality of your father, who died in 2012, seems to have had a great impact on you…
He was very humanist, he spent his time building relationships, even with people he met in the street. He was in words, both a professor of literature and a poet, he wrote songs, he was a specialist in Truffaut. He grew up in Cameroon and Ivory Coast with the expatriate Catholic couple from Lyon who adopted him. Very quickly, my father rebelled against both Catholicism and colonialism. He identified with the history of black slaves and in particular with African-Americans torn from their mother land, the same land which then welcomed him and his family. I feel like I’m carrying that. And I immediately felt like my father’s mother. I felt him very vulnerable, it developed something very maternal in me.
And your mother?
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