in tears, Juliette Binoche talks about the sexual violence she was a victim of

The stage was suddenly filled with emotions. Juliette Binoche was the guest of the show Click TV, Tuesday April 30. On this occasion, presenter Mouloud Achour questioned the actress on the column published by the magazine SHE , the same day, in which around a hundred men, mainly from the cultural industry, gave their support to the Me Too movement. Among them, the actors and directors Mathieu Amalric and Cyril Dion, the actor Reda Kateb and the director Abderrahmane Sissako. “Is it important that men speak?”, asked the presenter to the French icon. “It’s fundamental,” she replied without hesitation. Because from the moment we are heard, listened to, first of all we exist differently, and the pain, if it is heard, it hurts a little less.” Coming from the actress, these words draw on her experience, she who spoke at length to the newspaper Release on harassment and sexual assault suffered during film shooting, but also outside.

Echoing this interview published on April 27, Mouloud Achour then asked her if she had since received support from certain members of the film industry. “Especially directors and Claire Denis,” replied Juliette Binoche, naming the director for whom she played in Such a beautiful sun, released in 2017. When the presenter questions her about the nature of this support, the actress quotes the words that screenwriter Christophe Honoré addressed to her and which she describes as “something simple but which really made me good”. “He told me: ‘You shouldn’t have experienced that,’” she says, overwhelmed by emotion. As tears well up in his eyes, Mouloud Achour responds: “That’s what we all think” and adds that he wondered how the actress could have experienced that and why.

“We understand each other better”

With a trembling voice and moist eyes, Juliette Binoche still managed to speak again. “At the same time I think it made me stronger, because it makes me more courageous, because it makes me more human,” she added at first, containing herself with difficulty. “When we experience suffering or pain or difficulties, it certainly creates flaws in ourselves because it breaks, it betrays, it mistreats,” she continued, weighing each of her words. But at the same time we understand, there is something that means we know what it is to suffer, we understand the other better as a result. We are more able to have porosity, compassion, it allows us to be more human because we have to break down so much pride, everything that makes us a little rigid.

In his interview with Release, Juliette Binoche however assured that these traumas had not tainted her passion for cinema. “The low blows, the inappropriate gestures, the sexist remarks: I don’t forget them, they poison life, but they remain secondary. Ultimately, all is forgiven. Everything is transformed, everything has sculpted me. The desire to give myself through play remains stronger, the art of play is a form of secret jubilant knowledge, impossible to grasp, impossible to steal.”