On Female Sexuality in Film & Photos

... and how I came to shoot Pick My Flower

Jun 22, 2025

After resharing my project Pick My Flower from 2018 on instagram, I considered to revisit it again and share some background information, thoughts on the story and present a new edit.

What inspired me to do it

It was back in 2016, when I re-watched À Ma Sœr! (engl. Fat Girl) from 2001 by French writer and filmmaker Catherine Breillat. It took me a long time to find this film again, because my first encounter was on a bored out weekend while zapping through TV channels. When I landed on arte (the French-German cultural love child of TV) that night, I saw a young girl being being very horny and in the end, getting r*ped during her summer holiday. It felt like tuning into something forbidden. Watching it felt very voyeuristic, but something resonated with me. Breillat touched me with her unapologetic and drastic storytelling about female desire.

I spent years wrecking by brain about finding out what I had watched that night. After finally finding out, I took a deep dive into Breillat’s work and watched her whole catalogue, read all the books I could get my hands on. But her directorial debut film Une Vraie Jeune Fille (engl. A Real Young Girl) from 1976, which was finally released in 1999 — it was too explicit for the 70s — strikes me on an even deeper level. It’s about a young girl bored out of her mind at home during her summer vacation in the countryside while her sexual desires are omnipresent. She daydreams about her fantasies while trying to seduce a sawmill worker who works for her father.

A scene from *Une Vraie Jeune Fille* (1976)

Another scene from *Une Vraie Jeune Fille* (1976)

Female sexuality and lust are recurring themes in Breillat’s work, and what I find so striking is the way she shows the strength of female desire and its proximity to experiencing actual violence by men. Her depiction is raw and it highlights the danger inherent in expressing sexual desire as a woman, and the awareness her protagonists have that, even as they assert themselves, they are putting themselves at risk.

How Pick My Flower was born

I was very inspired by Une Vraie Jeune Fille to create something on my own, because it reminded me of how overwhelming sexual desire can feel, especially when you are young and experience these feelings for the first time. So I took my friends Bella & Skip and created a story about two girls, discovering their bodies and one drifting away into a wet fantasy in nature while pleasuring herself in the bath. For the new edit, I got rid of the framework of the story to just focus on the dream. By the way, everyone in these photos was over 18.

Why now ?

Revisiting these images now is important to me, because I took it slow in the last 6-12 months to reflect on my work, pondering which direction I want it to take in the future. Pick My Flower is where I am coming from and what I want to carry into my future work with me.

But enough with the text already, here is the new edit.