“Self-Sown”, interview with director David Champaigne

At the Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema 2026, organized by European Film Promotion and the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, David Champaigne presents his short film Self-Sown. Selected without his knowledge by the Slovenian Film Center while he was still finishing his master’s degree in film directing, Champaigne arrives at Future Frames with a story rooted in his own adolescence, set over one summer in Ljubljana.

Kids who raise themselves

Self-Sown follows Nicola, a teenager forced to grow up fast by his family circumstances, who searches on the street for the stability, acceptance and love he lacks at home. Champaigne says the title comes directly from his own past: “As a young boy, I was actually a part of an environment that was full of kids that I could say are self-sown. It’s actually something that’s kind of deeply rooted in my past and something that I’ve seen, something in part that I’ve experienced.” He describes the film as one about growing up too fast, ultimately “looking and searching for a place in the world for yourself.”

Switched roles, single parents in crisis

Living alone with a mother who is herself still very young, Nicola ends up in some way parenting his own parent. For Champaigne, this reversal is one of the film’s central subtopics. “Because they’ve been alone with their child their entire life… at one point they collapse and they crash and they can’t handle it anymore, and usually that happens when the child needs them the most.” That lack, he says, is what builds “aggression… anger, and… pain” in the main character.

From a 25-minute short to a feature, and the mask of toxic masculinity

What started as an idea for a feature became a short during Champaigne’s master, a test that convinced him he wants to keep developing it into a full-length film. Behind Self-Sown also lies a reflection on toxic masculinity and what he calls “the manosphere”. “Just because you’re a man, it doesn’t mean you can’t talk about your feelings. That’s the point: you have to talk about your feelings and how you feel. Otherwise you just hold it in… you can’t be a rock if you’re going to blow up inside like Nikolai is.”

The privilege of being a European director

Asked what it means to him to be a European director, Champaigne points to the artistic freedom that comes with an industry funded mostly by public money. A freedom he contrasts, without diminishing it, with the more commercial logic of the American studio system: “Nothing wrong, great films come out of there, but it’s a different system.”

Plot