C éline Sciamma always knew she was gay. She just didn’t know what to do about it. “Without the internet, lesbianism didn’t exist,” explains the French director, who came of age in the Nineties. “I mean, it did exist, but we were our own island, and we had to learn everything by ourselves. Imagine being 14 years old and going to the public library looking for lesbian romance, and just not knowing where to start. It’s like, ‘A, B, C, D…’” Is that how she learnt? “Yeah,” she says, with a laugh. “And cinema. And you have to make your own.”

So she did. For over a decade, the 41-year-old’s films have explored the kinds of identities and desires that those public libraries were missing. Her coming-of-age debut Water Lilies (2007) – filmed in the middle-class suburb just north of Paris in which she grew up, and written when she was still at film school – focused on a teenage girl’s infatuation with her synchronised swimming teammate.

The swimming, she said when it premiered at Cannes, was a metaphor for “the job of being a girl” – beauty and serenity above the surface, struggle and sacrifice below it. Tomboy (2011), released when society had an even more rudimentary understanding of gender fluidity than it does now, centred around a 10-year-old who adopts a masculine moniker on summer holiday. Girlhood (2014) followed a group of black schoolgirls in a poor suburb of Paris.

Through her work, Sciamma has earned a reputation not only as a harbinger of social progress but as a gifted auteur – one whose work is known for its sparse dialogue and tender, empathetic gaze. But her latest – the ravishing, slow-burning Portrait of a Lady on Fire – has ramped things up a notch. Since competing for the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes, the film has been gaining momentum around the world, and Sciamma has found herself much in demand. Having visited 20 French cities, 20 more across Europe and attended 14 premieres, she’s now sitting upstairs in a London members club, strong of spirit and of accent.

The 10 Best European films Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 Best European films The 10 Best European films People on Sunday (1930) Dir: Robert Siodmak, Edgar G Ulmer What did young German people get up to at the weekend in Weimar Berlin? If this silent film is the measure, they ate, drank, went to the park, mucked around and had sex in the woods. ‘People on Sunday’ is as fresh today as when it was first shown. It was made by some of the most talented figures in German cinema history, all at the very start of their careers and all about to be forced abroad by Hitler. Billy Wilder was the screenwriter, while Fred Zinnemann was the cinematographer. Called a ‘film without actors’, it is utterly fascinating as a slice of social history but also has a wild mischief and youthful energy BFI The 10 Best European films L’Atalante (1934) Dir: Jean Vigo ‘Vigo is cinema incarnate in one man,’ the legendary French film curator Henri Langlois rhapsodised about director Jean Vigo, who died of TB aged only 29 in 1934. That was the year Vigo completed his masterpiece, ‘L’Atalante’ (1934), a film not only revered by generations of critics but still considered a viable dating movie today. It tells the story of a barge journey across France. Two newlyweds, Captain Jean (Jean Dasté) and his sweetheart Juliette (Dita Parlo), set off together, madly in love, accompanied on their voyage by the ship’s barnacled mate Pere Jules (played by the great French character actor, Michel Simon). Jealousy, discomfort and homesickness threaten to fray the relationship. The film is both a paean to rural France and an astonishingly delicate and lyrical love story Gaumont Film Company The 10 Best European films La Règle du Jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939) Dir: Jean Renoir We probably wouldn’t have had ‘Downton Abbey’ without it. Jean Renoir’s film was a direct influence on Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, scripted by Julian Fellowes, who would later create ‘Downton’. The British may like to think that they originated the country house drama but Renoir does a superb job here, both upstairs and downstairs. This is a comedy of manners but one featuring conspiracy, betrayal and murder. On the evidence here, the French upper classes were just as corrupt and hypocritical as their British equivalents. ‘I wanted to depict a society dancing on a volcano,’ the director later observed of the film, made just before the start of the Second World War Nouvelle Édition Française The 10 Best European films Viaggio in Italia/Voyage to Italy (1954) Dir: Roberto Rossellini The wonderfully supercilious George Sanders shows his familiar mellowness of sneer as the husband being very beastly to his wife (Ingrid Bergman) in Rossellini’s dark romantic drama. The director was one of the pioneers of Neorealist cinema but this was a film in a very different register to his earlier epics ‘Rome, Open City’ and ‘Paisa’. It’s a caustic, uncomfortably intimate psychodrama about a couple on holiday in Naples whose marriage is falling apart. They can hardly bear to look at each other. Rossellini throws in references to antiquity – and in particular to the disaster at Pompeii – to show the couple’s relationship in a very different light. The film has one of the strangest, most surprising and moving endings in all of cinema Titanus Distribuzione The 10 Best European films Wild Strawberries (1957) Dir: Ingmar Bergman British (and international) perspectives on Sweden are very strongly influenced by the films of Ingmar Bergman. ‘Summer with Monika’ (1953), with Harriet Andersson as ‘mucky Monika’, dealt with sexuality in a far freer way than any British films from the period. ‘The Seventh Seal’ (1957) fixed the image of the gloomy, introspective Scandinavian playing chess with Death on the beach. Bergman’s ‘Wild Strawberries’, about a vain old professor (Victor Sjostrom), about to receive a great honour, looking back on his life, is an achingly beautiful film. It opens with one of cinema’s great dream sequences. In the course of the movie, the Scrooge-like professor revisits his past, comes to terms with his old demons and very movingly begins to mellow AB Svensk Filmindustri The 10 Best European films A Bout de Souffle/Breathless (1960) Dir: Jean-Luc Godard Godard’s famous formulation that all you need to make a movie is ‘a girl and a gun’ has a whiff of sexism about it. ‘Breathless’, though, is an example of a European New Wave film that blew everybody away. You could ignore the gossamer-thin crime thriller plot altogether and just concentrate on the formal boldness (all those jump cuts) and the interplay between the two stars. Movie couples didn’t come any more charismatic than the close-cropped Jean Seberg in her ‘New York Herald Tribune’ T-shirt and Jean-Paul Belmondo as the petty gangster, coming on like a Gallic Humphrey Bogart – but a craggier, better looking one who managed to make the simple act of smoking a cigarette into a supreme poetic endeavour Films Around The World The 10 Best European films The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) Dir: Luis Buñuel Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s Oscar winner about a group of well-heeled characters trying, and failing, to have dinner offered everything bourgeois British audiences wanted in a European arthouse movie. It was risque (the dinner hosts upstairs attempting to have sex while their dinner guests wait below), funny, morbid and very surprising. Imagine an X-rated version of ‘The Good Life’ or ‘Abigail’s Party’ and you’ll come close to its essence. In its own more restrained way, the film was also as subversive as ‘Un Chien Andalou’, Buñuel’s earlier surrealist masterpiece (co-directed with Salvador Dali). As American director Alan Rudolph noted approvingly, ‘watching this for the first time took every muscle in my appreciation mechanism. The satire is sharp, the tone startling, the humour cathartic’ 20th Century Fox The 10 Best European films Veronika Voss (1982) Dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the arch provocateur of European arthouse cinema in an era of huge generational friction in German society. He died young, aged 37, in 1982, but racked up an astonishing number of films. This was his penultimate feature, an elegiac and twisted Sunset Boulevard-like love story about the romance between a hardbitten sports reporter and an ageing, drug-addled movie star, disgraced because of her links to the Nazi regime. The film has grim moments involving drug addiction and the Holocaust. It is also gorgeously shot in black and white, boasts a beguiling score by Peer Raben, and is full of unexpected moments of lyricism and tenderness. As director Mark Cousins put it, ‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s women are versions of himself, his languor and despair. Wow’ The Criterion Collection The 10 Best European films The Three Colours Trilogy (1993-1994) Dir: Krzysztof Kieslowski When the Iron Curtain came down, many eastern European filmmakers were left at a total loss. They had spent their careers making veiled critiques of the Soviet Union and didn’t know what stories to tell next. Krzysztof Kieslowski was one Polish director who adjusted comfortably to changing times. His ‘Three Colours’ trilogy, a series of features made in quick succession, looked at liberty, equality and fraternity in strictly personal and metaphysical terms. The three features were closely focused character studies. Some critics sneered that the trilogy, with its beautiful protagonists (Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, Irene Jacob), looked like shampoo commercials. The glossy production values notwithstanding, these commercially successful European arthouse films ventured into spiritual, philosophical realms that few British films would go near MK2 Distribution The 10 Best European films The Lives of Others (2006) Dir: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Nobody thought much of ‘The Lives of Others’ at first. The Cannes Festival turned it down for competition. So did Berlin. Nonetheless, when it finally reached British cinemas in 2007, audiences were fascinated by debut director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s depiction of an East German society in which everybody snooped on everybody else. Donnersmarck somehow gave a story about the Stasi spying on a playwright with suspect views a huge emotional kick. Anyone expecting a John Le Carré-style Cold War drama was wrong-footed by a film in which even the clammy, voyeuristic state spy (Ulrich Muhe) ends up behaving with an unexpected nobility and selflessness Wiedemann & Berg

Dressed in a bomber jacket, her blue eyes making unwavering contact, Sciamma has a gentle kind of intensity about her. She speaks swiftly, her English imperfect but poetic. “I decided to look at this love, and all its possibility, rather than doing the impossible love story narrative,” she says of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. “Which is a way to give back their presence and their present and their desire to these women, because you can’t run like you want to. I really wanted to show how a love story that is fulfilling is a love story that emancipates you.”

Set in 18th-century Brittany, the film stars Adèle Haenel – who worked with Sciamma on Water Lilies, and with whom the director was in a relationship for a number of years – as Héloïse. Mysterious and obstinate, she is soon to be married off to a Milanese nobleman, a prospect she dreads. Noémie Merlant is Marianne, a young artist hired to paint Héloïse for said nobleman ahead of the wedding. The bride-to-be refused to sit for the other (male) painters, so Marianne must attempt to do the portrait under the guise of being her chaperone, snatching glances as they walk along the clifftops.

They’re awkward at first, Héloïse stiff with suspicion, Marianne struggling to keep up the ruse. But gradually, that stiffness gives way to intrigue, then attraction. As the film progresses – at its own, teasing pace – their interactions become so heavy with desire that it’s almost unbearable. When they finally act on it, the consummation is as fiery as it is respectful. “Consent,” says Sciamma, “is sexy.”

Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (Curzon Artificial Eye)

The first time the two women sleep together, Héloïse asks, “Do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?” It’s a knock-out line. “A relationship is about inventing your own language,” says Sciamma. “You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.”

We know from the first scene that the two women don’t end up together. Was that to avoid giving the audience false hope? “Yes, and also because I wanted to question what a happy ending is,” says Sciamma. “We have the romantic-comedy philosophy – a frozen image of two people being together – and we also have the tragic ending. And I wanted neither. Why do we believe that eternal possession of somebody means a happy ending? Love educates us about art. Art consoles us from lost love. Our great loves are a condition of our future love. The film is the memory of a love story; it’s sad but also full of hope.”

By design, there are almost no men in the film – though the impending heterosexual nuptials loom like a cloud over every passionate embrace. “I wanted to use the tools of cinema so you would feel patriarchy without actually having to embody it with an antagonist,” says Sciamma. Free from the gaze of men, Marianne, Héloïse, and the servant Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) are in a sort of utopia. There, the women and their love can briefly flourish. “When a man comes back in the frame,” smiles Sciamma, “it’s a jump scare.”

The job of being a girl: Sciamma’s ‘Water Lillies’ (2007) (Balthazar Productions)

Earlier this month, Natalie Portman walked the Oscars red carpet with “Sciamma” sewn in gold stitching on the trim of her Dior cape. There, too, were the names of several other female directors snubbed by the Academy. Sciamma is a founding member of Le Collectif, a French movement aiming to correct the gender imbalance in international film-making. The fact that men are almost always front and centre of cinema, she says, leaves them “unaware of their privilege. Ninety per cent of what we look at is the male gaze. They don’t see themselves anymore.”

She recalls recording the DVD commentary for Portrait with a male recording engineer, who watched the film alongside her. When – two hours in – a man’s hand appeared in the frame, the engineer looked down at his own. “He said, ‘I looked at my hand, because that’s the hand of a man.’ That’s what I wanted to do – there’s no man in the film, not as some kind of punishment, but as a way for them to go through someone else’s journey. You’ve been looking only at women and suddenly it feels different, weird.” She laughs. “And that’s cinema, you know?”

It’s not just arthouse cinema that can do this. Sciamma says that Wonder Woman, the 2017 superhero blockbuster directed by Patty Jenkins, changed her life. “It’s about feeling seen as a viewer,” she says. “Wonder Woman is thinking about me. It’s thinking about my pleasure, about my sisters, about the history of cinema and women’s representation. It gives us joy but also rage. Like, ‘Why do I not get this more often?’ Now, we get it more and more, because there’s new writing for women, but it’s an addictive feeling. Once you know it, you want it.”

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the first of Sciamma’s films to centre women in adulthood. The rest of them have been, in one way or another, coming-of-age stories. I bring up something she said once – that for women, losing the androgyny of childhood is a “tragedy, because you lose your freedom”. Did that happen to her? “Wow,” she says. There’s a 10-second pause. “I was such a gay child. I played by these rules, of course, but knowing that it was a performance. And I suffered from the fact that it was a performance. You have to be patient. You have to just wait for your life to start.”