Madame
Madame takes us on an intimate journey where Caroline, a flamboyant 90-year-old grandmother and her filmmaker grandson Stéphane explore the development and transmission of gender identity in a patriarchal environment. Promised to a domestic life in the 1920s, Caroline frees herself from the clutches of a forced marriage and becomes a successful businesswoman, defying the social rules of her time. In parallel, Stéphane struggles to play the role everyone expects in his Swiss bourgeois family, until the day he comes out of the closet and sets off on a crusade against homophobia and sexism. A family saga based on private archive footage, the film offers a dialog between this extravagant matriarch and her gay grandson, challenging the taboos of gender and sexuality.
Stéphane Riethauser, born in Switzerland, currently lives in Berlin and works as a filmmaker. He holds a law degree from the University of Geneva, and has worked as a teacher, gay rights activist, photographer, editor, journalist and translator. Between 2003 and 2008, he worked for Swiss Radio Television (RTS) as a journalist and director. He launched his production company, Lambda Prod, in 2007.