Suzanne Lindon on Starring in Claire Denis’ New Film for Miu Miu

The French actor and director, who appears opposite Kim Gordon in Denis’ Avec Kim, reflects on her unexpected friendship with the Beau Travail auteur, and the bonds of sisterhood underpinning their new film for the Women’s Tales series

At Venice Film Festival last week, May el-Toukhy was asked to comment on a main competition section that skewed overwhelmingly male. “I’ve never, ever read an article where a female director is promoted as a genius,” the director said at a press conference for her film Woman Unknown, one of only two female-directed features to compete for the coveted Golden Lion this year. “All of us our responsible for changing this discourse.”

Luckily one such genius was called upon to present her work for the Women’s Tales series, which has been in the business of spotlighting women in cinema since 2011. Claire Denis’ Avec Kim had its premiere as the Miu Miu showcase’s 32nd short film on Friday. Hosted as part of the festival’s Venice Days programme, it was a dreamlike cruise through the streets of Paris’s 12th arrondissement starring Suzanne Lindon and Sonic Youth icon Kim Gordon.

“I was so happy to know that they thought of Claire because to me this project was made for her,” says Lindon of the film, shot in entrancing slow motion with no dialogue and music from Gordon, a longtime friend of the director’s. “Claire is the person that made me want to make films. It’s about her filmmaking, but it’s also just the way she is – the way she took [up] space in the world at a time when women filmmakers were not heard or considered [the way they are] today, even though we still need to fight. She has this independence and spirit of just doing what she wants and saying what she has to say.”

Denis first reached out to Lindon, the daughter of French acting royalty Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Lindon, to tell her she admired Spring Blossom, the film she directed at the age of 19 in 2020. “I think that Claire loves people who are doing stuff, no matter what,” says Lindon. “And this is the story of my film, because I did it knowing that my parents are famous and that people on Twitter and everywhere else would want to kill me because I was doing a movie. I know I grew up in a very privileged bubble in which it’s [possible] to make a film when you’re 19, but I’ve never hidden myself and I just decided to do whatever I wanted, which I think Claire appreciated.”

The correspondence led to a collaboration between the pair on 2025’s The Fence, which Lindon wrote with Denis over a year and a half in the director’s kitchen. But Avec Kim was the first chance she’d had to observe Denis up close on set, which she realised was even more so her “natural habitat” than her home. In the film, Lindon plays a mechanic taking a vintage Ford Granada out on the road to meet her friend, played by Gordon. Scrubbing the grease from her face in the bathroom mirror after the day’s work, she changes out of her overalls into a black leather ensemble purloined from Miu Miu’s Autumn/Winter 2026 collection. 

While out on the road, Lindon’s character stops in at a shop to make a delivery, and also helps a young woman struggling to carry a chair across the road. They’re small details, but they accentuate the film’s themes of “friendship and mentorship and the relationships between women, whatever lives they’ve had or language that they speak”, says Lindon. “To me when I stop to help this young girl in the street, it’s like a chain reaction. I mean, Kim helps me, I help the girl.”

Denis’ film screened alongside the prepossessingly strange 31st entry into the series, Discipline, presented at the showcase by director Mona Fastvold with star Amanda Seyfried and choreographer Celia Rowlson Hall. “All my work is feminist but it’s also very feminine,” Fastvold said of the film, which sees dancers bring a series of mannequins to life as pupils at a Catholic boarding school, staffed by nuns wearing creepy masks. Seyfried, sporting the same dress Fastvold wore to the premiere of The Testament of Ann Lee last year, plays a doll that breaks with tradition in what the director described as a “twisted little sister” to the trio’s feature collaboration. “It’s about the self you present to the world, and your true self,” Fastvold continued. Later that evening, the stars of both films gathered for a candlelit dinner at Ca’ Corner della Regina, hosted by Miuccia Prada and attended by industry luminaries including Susan Sarandon, Pamela Anderson, Taylor Russell, Chloe Zhao, Thuso Mbedu and Maggie Gyllenhaal – an intimate occasion for friends and collaborators, and a timely reminder that the future of women-led filmmaking remains bright.