Where the Wild Kids Are: Céline Sciamma and the Queer Forest

Combining Martin Heidegger’s concept of Holzwege —the tangled forest paths that serve as metaphors for being, knowledge and truth—with the wild epistemology of queer theorist Jack Halberstam and similar explorations of queer ecology, this article applies a phenomenological lens to the representation of the forest as a site of queer time, space and being in the work of Céline Sciamma, focused primarily on Tomboy (2011) and Petite Maman (2020). The logic of child’s play and imagination coalesces with the unbound and wild epistemological conditions of the marginalized forest, forming in these two films a discernible “world within the world” that serves as the primary site of development and transformation. Traversing the boundaries between the known, familiar world of French middle-class domesticity and the unbound, wild expanse of the woods, Sciamma’s films offer alternative possibilities of maturation on the margins of heteropatriarchal normality for her queer and gender non-conforming protagonists.