For the shoot of White Material Claire Denis returned to Cameroon, where she spent a considerable part of her youth. With the encouragement of actress Isabelle Huppert and in close collaboration with writer Marie NDiaye, she created the story of a white coffee plantation owner who stubbornly tries to hold on to her land when a violent civil war breaks out. In this film, Denis returns to a theme that’s dear to her: the friction between intruding and belonging, between foreignness and sameness. “The presence of foreign bodies in my work stems from my childhood. I myself have experienced how a foreign body feels and that’s also why I made the film L'Intrus, about the intrusion of a hostile body. That’s also what I wanted to do in White Material: show that even if white men think they are the rulers of the world, their whiteness is sometimes hostile." 

French spoken with Dutch subtitles