‘An Icon Is Here’: Juliette Binoche Takes Over Karlovy Vary, Talks Directorial Debut ‘In-I in Motion’ and Explains Why ‘We’re All Creators’

Juliette Binoche has taken over Karlovy Vary.

“An icon is here,” said the festival’s artistic director Karel Och, welcoming her to the stage.

In town to pick up the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema, Binoche also presented her directorial debut “In-I in Motion.”

In the documentary, she reveals everything that went into the making of dance-theater stage production of “In-I,” focusing on her intense collaboration with British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan.

“Once upon a time, I was in London and I was lying face down, being massaged by Su-Man Hsu. She asked me: ‘Do you want to dance?’ And I said yes,” she recalled. She ended up going to Khan’s show. 

“He was dancing like a genius, going around like crazy. At the end, he asked me: ‘Do you want to spend two days in the studio and see if we could do something together?’ We didn’t know each other and we didn’t have a theme, we didn’t decide what we were going to do, but we wanted to learn the other person’s art form. He wanted to act and I wanted to move.”

They created a show and went on tour, performing it 120 times. One time, Robert Redford himself was in the audience. 

“Towards the end of the tour, Robert Redford saw the show and he said: ‘You have to do a film out of the show.’ What you will see [today] is what Robert Redford wanted,” she said.

She didn’t want to explain too much in the film. 

“I wanted the spectators to have their own feelings and be in a position of a creator,” she noted.

In his review for Variety, Guy Lodge agreed: “Assembled wholly from ample studio rehearsal footage and vivid live recording of the finished stage production, ‘In-I In Motion’ is free of voiceover, interviews or any kind of framing commentary to establish how Binoche and Khan, this far out from their unlikely experiment, now perceive the outcome and what they learned from it,” he wrote.

“Rather, the documentary affords viewers raw access to the creation process, and the rare fascination of watching two leading artists at times out of their depth, figuring out new dimensions to their craft on the hoof, so to speak.”

Binoche added: “Sometimes, as you’re going through creation, you’re discovering what you’re doing. The idea of this film is that at the end of it, we’re all creators. And you want to do something you’ve never done before.”