The hybrid documentary-fiction feature film follows Charlie as she navigates the rules of elegance, etiquette and conversation
“Small Talk,” directed my Mateo Ybarra (“Over Our Hills,” “Summer Camp”), will have its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival on Aug. 11.
The film stars Hélène Bares (“Evy & Me”) as Charlie, who signs up for a summer course at Switzerland’s only remaining etiquette school for women. Her reason for attending is to land a career within the elite luxury industry. The film profiles real women from all over the world and addresses issues of underlying gender roles, class hierarchy, and female empowerment.
“What makes ‘Small Talk’ stand out is the way fiction and documentary truly feed into each other. On one hand you’re emotionally invested in Charlie’s story, on the other you’re watching this fascinating institution with almost an ethnographic curiosity. You leave the film both fully entertained and full of questions about the world, which is pretty rare,” said Garance Targowla, sales & acquisition manager at Urban Sales, which handles “Small Talk.”
The film is produced by Mateo Ybarra and Madeline Robert of L’Artifice, and co-produced by RTS Radio Télévision Suisse.
Variety interviewed Mateo Ybarra ahead of its world premiere.
Which part of the film is documentary and which part is fiction?
Mateo Ybarra: It’s the very question that the film asks the audience: in an environment where people learn to perform within high society, who is ultimately playing a role?
From the very beginning, however, one element was absolutely clear to everyone involved in the process: actress Hélène Bares was invited to take part in the program as a genuine student, attending the full six-week intensive course alongside the other participants.
All of the students are actually taking the course and appear in the film as themselves. The same is true of the teaching staff and the classes themselves.
How did you come to learn of the school and what motivated you to make a film about it?
Ybarra: The school has existed for more than 70 years and, although it is now the last finishing school of its kind in Switzerland, it belongs to a tradition that once thrived.
A friend first told me about it back in 2016, pointing out that Swiss filmmakers rarely film within their own country, despite the wealth of fascinating places and institutions it has to offer. That conversation stayed with me and ultimately led me in this direction.
Ybarra: The school’s main six-week summer program is exclusively for women. Although it offers mixed courses during the rest of the year, its core activity remains primarily for women. They also told me that they have regularly asked students whether they would like to include men in the program, but so far they have preferred to keep it women-only.
How do you see this institution from a feminist perspective?
Ybarra: The school belongs to a tradition in which young women were educated to fulfill roles as wives, mothers and hostesses, reflecting gender roles and social norms that are now widely regarded as sexist or outdated. The curiosity surrounding this kind of institution today stems precisely from the question of how such a school can still exist. Yet today, it presents itself as a protected space, free from male presence, whose purpose is to equip women with the tools to navigate a society still largely structured by patriarchal norms.
If feminism is understood as a movement against all forms of domination and oppression, then I believe there remains an unresolved paradox in attempting to pursue this ideal within a society structured by vertical hierarchies and ultra-capitalist values.
What interested me was witnessing how people negotiate with the systems that already exist. I wanted to show that they are not necessarily victims of those systems, but are often fully conscious of them. Social change happens more slowly than our political aspirations.
Charlie seems to evolve dramatically as time goes by.
Ybarra: How Charlie would experience the school remained an open question throughout the shoot. Of course, we imagined several possible directions, depending on how her journey unfolded.
We built the film around a character who chooses to invest in this program in the hope of achieving a form of social and professional mobility that might allow her to move beyond her current circumstances. Yet the social expectations and the pressure exerted by the world she aspires to join are very real. This raises the question of how one preserves one’s identity, and whether that is ultimately possible at all.
How did the real students taking the course feel about being filmed?
Ybarra: The film relies on a very delicate balance between what we learn through the institute’s classes, Charlie’s personal journey, and, above all, the presence of the other students. What surprised us most was the extraordinary ability of the students to embrace the cinematic proposition. We gradually realized that many of them had spent their lives navigating complex social expectations, and that this experience had given them an exceptional ease in front of the camera.
Their generosity, freedom and sincerity moved us deeply. They are not simply people being filmed; they became essential presences within the narrative, giving the film a truth and vitality that we could never have written ourselves. Reality is such wonderful material.