Director Rebecca Zlotowski fifth feature film, “Other People’s Children,” is an emotionally provocative look at the life of a young teacher named Rachel, played by Virginie Efira, and her interactions with a single father. For Zlotowski, the film is a deeply autobiographical story inspired by many of the director’s own life experiences being a stepmother. But the film, which screened in January at the Sundance Film Festival, is resonating with single women for its nuanced exploration of how women navigate questions of motherhood.
It’s an intentional topic of Zlotowski’s feature despite her initial hesitation in telling the story to begin with. “I feel I resisted a lot. I didn’t want to tell this story,” she told TheWrap. “You struggle a lot not to tell a story and it imposes itself without being very romantic about creation.” The arrival of the pandemic left the director analyzing cities and the domestic lives people create around themselves and settled on a character that paralleled her. And Zlotowski makes no bones about how much of the character is inspired by her. The man playing Rachel’s father is Zlotowski’s own father, and the grave Rachel prays at in one scene is that of Zlotowski’s mother.
“This one had to be written with not not only my brain, but with my body,” she said. “It was the starting point. This thing was literally something [that] could live in my body and that was the end of fertility, and I had to deal with it. And I had to do something with it. I did this film, in order to survive it.” The film’s poignant exploration of femininity, and the personal choices of either having a child or not, are at the forefront of “Other People’s Children.”
An age-old question that’s come with the film is the concept of women “having it all.” As films of the ’80s laid out, women could be successful in both motherhood and business. Zlotowski wonders if we shouldn’t be revising the concept of “having it all” entirely. “When you have it all, it’s like you’re f–ked,” she said. “Because [is] it when you have the money? Is it when you raise the children?” Zlotowski said, instead, people should be seeing having it all as the path to self-enlightenment. “To ‘have it all’ is to follow the path of freedom,” she said. “Freedom means being in charge of the choices you make.”
And it’s hard to shake the resonance of seeing Rachel’s journey toward finding freedom, particularly in an American landscape where women’s rights are quickly being eroded day-by-day. “In this film, we’re like postmodern and post-feminism in a way, even if it’s terribly retrograde in countries, in mine and in yours. It’s a terrible moment for feminist issues, but we could tell that work, and career and children is okay,” she said.
Zlotowski believes, though, the bigger issue with regards to women today, and it’s one explored in the film, is fertility and how women often are presented with the end of fertility as the end of their lives. “The unfairness is that at a certain moment men can have children and women, it’s like the end of a chapter. It’s the end of the novel for them. We can work on that,” she said. She hopes, if anything, watching the film will let women see if children aren’t in the cards for them, whether by choice or not, it can be presented positively. If anything, she sees nuances like that as necessary in the feminist discourse going on right now, that women shouldn’t be penalized for not having children, nor should they be held to a high standard about having everything.
“Other People’s Children” opens in theaters April 21.
