Interview: Victor Boocard (Moongirl)

French filmmaker Victor Boccard traces his love of cinema to a formative trip in his youth, while his instinct for world-building can be traced back to childhood spent playing with Lego – the toy blocks. Among the shorts selected for this year’s Toronto Intl. Film Festival’s Short Cuts programme is Moongirl, a film that draws on French and Japanese cultural traditions, alongside a wide range of other influences, to explore intimacy, identity and the stories we tell to make sense of loss. Bringing together Victor Hugo’s poetry and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Boccard’s short reflects on the desire to preserve someone we have lost, until imagination and memory become inseparable from lived experience. I spoke with Boccard about the film’s carefully constructed visual language (witness here), his casting choice in Kotona Minami, as well as the early influences and contemporary filmmakers that continue to shape his work. Here is our sit-down in Toronto.