Patience mon amour, a web series by Camille Duvelleroy

Camille Duvelleroy has been writing and producing transmedia fiction and documentaries for almost ten years. Working mainly as a freelancer, this social media enthusiast has been experimenting with every possible form from her base in Toulouse: virtual reality, social media, interactive comics and more. In 2018, alongside the author Jacques Goldstein and the cartoonist Alex W. Inker, she signed the interactive comic book Panama Al Brown, produced by Bachibouzouk. Recently, she also directed Lady Sapiens VR, a virtual reality film that puts us in the skin of a woman from the Palaeolithic period. 

Patience mon amour is a webseries designed exclusively for the Instagram platform, where it is broadcast on the Arte France account in the form of stories. The 31 episodes, each lasting about two minutes, follow the difficult journey of a couple through the IVF process: Gabrielle (Sophie de Fürst) and Alice (Isabelle Joly). Filmed in a vertical format and interspersed with text messages, this drama treats the difficulties encountered by these two women with humour and sensitivity. They are confronted with failure, the gaze and judgement of others, and the conflicts that can arise within a couple when the desire for a child is thwarted.

Camille Duvelleroy drew on her own experience to write Patience mon amour. Confronted with the duration and multiple difficulties of this journey, she wanted this process, beyond the birth of a child, to also give life to a story. A story to be deployed on social media, a platform she knows well and has been experimenting with for years. By producing content that can be viewed in short sessions on a smartphone, the aim is to invest in the technological object where most of our intimate dramas and joys are now played out.

By coincidence, Patience mon amour was released on Instagram at the same time as the French parliament voted to offer IVF to lesbians and single women definitively. Although the series takes place in 2016, it remains topical insofar as it explores, without taboos, the pitfalls, but also the joys, of a journey that the director is keen to demystify and which, according to her, has nothing of the "fairy tale" about it. She explores several possible routes extensively: artificial insemination in Spain, "home-made" donor, etc. A shorter version, which summarises the plot, is also available on the arte.tv website, in the form of a short film entitled Encore un peu de patience mon amour.