In just seven short films, including the recently much-lauded Fox (2016), Hiwa (2017) and Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year (2018), Jacqueline Lentzou has made her aesthetic concerns and her remarkable talent abundantly clear. With a curious and empathetic camera, she captures moments of change and transition that are often unwanted, moments that perhaps we wish mattered more, moments that reveal a great deal about us. The banality of adolescent totems, the sadness that holds maturity at bay, the loss of something we never knew to value: these are the moments that define the Greek filmmaker’s striking body of work. During a week of screenings that formed part of Lincoln Center’s and the Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films festival, I spoke with the filmmaker about how she crafts her own language of discovery and tenderness.

Many of your films feel as though we are eavesdropping on private moments no one thought to share. Could you talk about developing the language of intimacy in your films?

When I’m asked how I think about something, I can’t come up with a good answer, because, at least in the short format, it’s very instinctive. I write visually, because I think intimacy and the whole feeling of a film are written before it happens on set. My cinematographer, Konstantinos Koukoulios, is my best friend, and that is very important, because I’d say my tendency to work with people I’m close to is connected to the situations I try to portray in my films. It comes about very, very naturally. I made an early decision that I don’t like static cameras, and that comes from that same natural place. While I was still in school, I switched to handheld cinematography. All our film exercises required fixed positions and tripods, and I never felt free. Around 2010, I realized that I like roaming freely. Camera movement reminds me of how our eyes move. When I look at you, I’m not just looking at you; I’m also looking behind you and around you. I’m glad we’re talking about intimacy; being able to convey it, having an organic side to the films, is one of my goals. I want people to feel that they are there, sharing that moment and everything that is happening.

The balance between your use of the tripod and your handheld movement is quite interesting. You explore spaces not in the traditional way but after a chaotic moment. I’m thinking in particular of the church scene in “Hector Malot.”

I was thinking of the church too! I like to set up a relationship that does the exact opposite of what an establishing shot does. Rather than telling viewers that we are now here, I’m more interested in telling them that we are now in this state of mind. What really interests me is mood and atmosphere. I also need wide shots so I can breathe. In “Hector Malot,” I found it more interesting that the character isn’t fully aware of exactly where she is. Also, when I have my wide shot, I usually move back and forth a lot, and I feel I owe my audience something calmer to prepare them for what comes next. In “Hiwa,” the camera is always moving. Even when I watch it now, I love some aspects of it. It’s very shaky; maybe if I had added a few calmer shots, it would have been a more soothing experience for the viewer.

“Hiwa” was the first film of yours I saw, and I felt as if I were preparing to watch an avant-garde film. Of course, there is a lot of experimentation in your other work too, but you tell more linear and emotional stories to catch people just before adulthood. How do you finance films like these? I imagine it would be hard to try to explain them in a synopsis.

I hate writing synopses. It’s not something I do well; it feels like a chore. I should do the dishes, I should write a synopsis. Fortunately, in short filmmaking they largely don’t need a synopsis, but right now I’m working on two feature films, and the first thing they ask for is a synopsis, because they don’t have time to read the whole script. Synopses don’t convey what’s in a creator’s head; it’s just another document. For “Fox,” my only film to receive official funding from the Greek Film Centre, I had to write an application. They asked for the script and gave me 9,000 euros. That’s nothing. Thank God I always had a producer who could create good things out of the limited means at hand. For “Hiwa,” which is a crazy film, I was commissioned by the Athens Film Festival, together with six other directors, to show Athens in a different way, and they gave us 7,000 euros for it. “Hector Malot” was a labor of love; I also foresaw that there would be a delay with my feature, and in the meantime I felt the need to shoot something else. Finding funding is hard work. I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s true that you can be more creative and daring when you have no money.

How much of the work is indirectly autobiographical? How much is inspired by other people’s experiences?

I don’t deliberately use other people’s experiences much. I don’t really know what happens unconsciously. I’m truly interested in my friends and family, in people. But everything still comes down to the creation of my individual worldview. Everything I write and try to convey develops through me. Of course it isn’t biographical, but the source material is always personal. When I watch a film, no matter how beautifully it’s made, what makes me fall in love with it is honesty. That’s a subject in itself: what is honesty? It must be entirely about people writing what they know. For now, what I know best is how I perceive experiences, how I feel and the moods I go through. I try to make personal films, not self-referential ones, and there is an important difference between the two.

Knowing that you’re a Harmony Korine fan makes sense, especially when we think of parts of “Fox,” which is set in a sort of messy, slightly grotesque suburban environment. You both capture a messy, melancholic, hermetic sense of adolescence. The eccentric family and the deliberately dirty-looking house reminded me of my own childhood as much as of Korine. Where did the image of the house come from?

The fact that I love Harmony Korine has to do with growing up much like his characters. When I discovered him, I was spellbound, because I identified with what he was making films about. If you could see my house: when my mother was young it was very grand, but when we moved back there when I was a child, it was a completely decaying house. Being in a house that has always been old, unchanged and beautiful is different, but when you grow up somewhere, feeling its decline gets into your bones. It changes over time, the walls peel, it smells of damp. I know that very well. In Gummo (1997), in the scene where the boy lifts a portrait and we see a swarm of flies come out from behind it, I felt as if I were there. I didn’t grow up in a house quite like that, but…The reference point for the house in “Fox” was my home in Thessaloniki. Finding a house that once held happiness but that happiness had since abandoned was a very conscious move. I really love directors like Harmony Korine, Chantal Akerman, Jonas Mekas and Claire Denis, and I feel we have a bond, as if we were from the same family. Even though I’m not as talented as they are, I think we have something in common. They get into my system and shape me like a song, but I never say, “Let’s shoot it like this.” I’ve seen a lot of shorts that resemble each other stylistically, and it feels like a fashion. People see something, admire it and want to make a copy of it. When that’s done consciously it doesn’t work, but when it happens subconsciously, it has more depth.

Decay is a very old literary conceit, rather than a specifically cinematic one. In Dickens, for example…

And in Baudelaire…

Yes! In your films you use it as a kind of dramatic and ironic counterpoint. Just as we see young people moving into new phases of their lives, around them are the bones of what has happened and the ghost of progress that never came to pass.

You know what? I believe that’s how life is. I don’t understand films and books that say everything will be fine once you grow up, or that everything is bad when someone dies. This view of good and bad, light and dark, was an easier way to understand the world even as a child. The world is more complicated than that. Of course things will work out. I’m not an optimistic person, but I believe in change, and decay is itself a change. In a way, it’s the same idea.

I would have thought that growing up surrounded by evidence of one of our oldest cultures would reinforce that understanding. In America we don’t have that. We are a young culture, and we tell children they can be anything they want to be. We’re supposed to hide our dissatisfaction, whereas Europeans, especially the French, know that part of life is understanding decay.

Some of my favorite writers are the French writers of the ’60s – Camus, Sartre and the rest of the existentialists. One reason they affected me is that through them I could read things I had felt for a long time but couldn’t put into words when I was 15 or 16. That’s why I’ve always been drawn to the French.

That’s the perfect age, when we are still forming our worldview. What were your teenage years like?

I digested what happened in my childhood very early. What others do at 30, I did on my own at a younger age. Growing up was harder because of my family relationships. In primary school I wasn’t aware of how bad everything was. In my teenage years I faced a lot of things. I had been writing since childhood and thought I would become a writer. When my writing grew darker, I made new friends. We started watching films by directors other than Scorsese and Coppola – who, of course, were magnificent too. But at that time other doors opened. Names like Wim Wenders and Gus Van Sant steered me toward cinema. While watching Elephant (2003), I decided that I could make films too. It was the first arthouse film I saw, at 14, and I thought, “I can do this too!” These things shaped me. I identify with who I was back then and with the decisions I made. Of course I’ve grown up, I’m 29, but I don’t see my teenage self as different from my child self or my adult self, which of course makes things a bit chaotic for me and my friends, and even my relationships. I think it’s the fact that there is no pure division of time, and that I see people as whole units. It seems strange to me when people look back and say, “I can’t believe I did that when I was 15.” They are so far from who they were then. How can you not believe it? Who were you? I have that memory. I can’t say that this event fed this or that, but arthouse cinema certainly led me to a great deal of introspection that helped me understand these things.

Scout Tafoya

Translation (into Turkish): Nil Ege Özden