The Reel Deal

The film premiered at The Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week this year and has been doing the festival rounds since then. It managed a houseful on Monday afternoon at the 13th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF). Pleased,the Coulin sisters talk about the universality of its subject. “It’s about teenagers who like to dream and enjoy life. It’s also about the peer pressure they face as well as the things they do to draw attention,” says Muriel.

The film is inspired by a 2008 incident,where 18 teenagers in Massachusetts were part of an alleged “pregnancy pact”. In the course of research,they discovered too many similarities between the life of these American teenagers and that of those living in Brittany,a French seaside town they grew up in. They even ended up shooting the film in their hometown.

While Muriel browsed through the facts related to the subject of teenage pregnancy,Delphine was the one contributing to the script with her imagination. This has helped the sisters,whose collaboration has produced seven documentaries before,to maintain the balance between reality and cinema’s make-believe world in 17 Girls. To achieve that kind of non-interfering approach,the sisters’ documentary-making experience came handy. They,however,refrained from the trend of using hand-held cameras for a documentary-style movie. “Every shot was planned,” the Coulins says.

One of the prime concerns related to the subject — which they discovered during their research and touched upon in their movie — is that teenagers continue to live their age even when pregnant. “They run around,drink and smoke,which at times turns risky,” says Delphine. This adolescent trait is meaningfully showcased in the film,taking the viewers’ mind off the serious problem of school girls dealing with pregnancy. “We did not want to sound judgmental. We wanted to let the viewers imagine the situation and do their own thinking,” says Muriel.

However,when one of the girls meets with an accident and loses her baby,the film drives home the point it needs to make.