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'The cinema is the space in which I feel most at home," says Sophie Fiennes. "That's why my response is to make films for the cinema, to insist on cinema."
Fiennes pauses and I wonder whether this is the moment to let her know that I have just watched the latest film she has directed on DVD, a method of viewing she feels is equivalent to reading "a Xerox, sent by a fax". She sighs, looks distressed. "I know that I'm going against the grain," she adds. "Because increasingly in future people are going to watch films on their mobile phones."
Her new film is a bold, beautiful but demanding documentary about the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Called Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (a quotation from the Book of Isaiah), it has been well received at festivals in Toronto and Cannes.
During our hour together, 43-year-old Fiennes talks about French New Wave cinema, the British choreographer Michael Clark, whom she managed in the Nineties (and through whom she first met Kiefer), and the poetry of Yeats. Her son, born eight weeks ago, she named Horace, she says, because his Roman namesake figures in a Yeats poem which one night early in her pregnancy, she dreamt she was reciting to her dead mother.
By the end of our encounter, my brain feels overworked. But perhaps such highbrow conversation is par for the course when you belong to a large family of relentless high achievers. Fiennes is one of six siblings, all but one of whom have distinguished themselves within the arts (the exception is a conservationist). Brothers Ralph and Joseph are actors,...