The project is presented as a series of fictional portraits that are nevertheless deeply rooted in the lives and experiences of the actors. How did you navigate the boundary between fiction and self-portraiture without slipping into pure testimony or conventional fiction?

It was precisely with this desire to freely navigate along this boundary that this work was undertaken. The balance lies in what I call the “actor-model.” We were not looking for a classical performance, but rather an immersion into their personal life trajectories. The five portraits that comprise Home Bitter Home were constructed from the raw material of their subjects’ lived experiences, yet they did not simply recount or record these experiences. By placing these artists within familiar spatial-temporal contexts, fiction ceases to be a mask and instead becomes a revelator of their inner truth. This approach rejects the classic dichotomy between genres; it is a quest for organic truth rather than narrative artifice, capturing the immediacy of an inspiring presence that only stylized fiction can extract from the mundane. It was not a matter of choosing a particular actor to perform a particular fictional character, but rather of choosing a specific fictional narrative to frame the presence of a particular actor.

In the film, there is a perceptible “mirror game” between filmmaker and actor, where identity seems to be constructed through dialogue. How did this dynamic influence the writing and direction of each segment?

This “mirror game” is at the heart of the process: the filmmaker reflects back to the actor an image of their own identity—one that is often more revealing than what the actor perceives themselves. This process is deeply stimulating because it demands a reciprocal stripping away of layers. The writing was nourished by the specific aura of each performer; the direction does not dictate, it “induces”. It is a four-handed writing process where the image becomes a space of mutual recognition.

Each portrait has its own tone and aesthetic, yet together they form a coherent body of work. How did you balance each director’s authorial autonomy with the need for an overall cinematic unity?

While each duo has its own aesthetic fingerprint, the unity stems from the recurring themes shared by these five portraits. These stylistic differences, by way of contrast, provide a richer relief to the whole. Generally, in a film offering a group portrait, we distinguish the various characters by easily identifiable attributes, often linked to their appearance and/or their living environments. In Home Bitter Home, each directorial choice and the resulting aesthetic style function as the supreme and irreducible attribute of each character. This is not a representative sample, but rather the representation of unique individuals who, at a specific time and place, coexisted. In this sense, the disparity of formal approaches can only serve the underlying moral of this project: the more the uniqueness of each individual is emphasized, the better one avoids a reductive discourse on the group to which they belong. Nevertheless, on another level, it demonstrates that, despite our individual solitudes, we resonate more deeply when united in a shared aesthetic reflection.