You've Got Lovely Eyes, You Know! Episode 3: Muriel Cravatte, AFC, on her documentary film "Mothership"

Valérie Potonniée: Hello and welcome to Radio RapTZ for the show T'as De Beaux Yeux Tu Sais (You Have Beautiful Eyes, You Know), the podcast that interviews female directors of photography about their work. We are part of the Femmes à la caméra collective and we asked ourselves: Is the female gaze a myth or a reality? A trap or a lever? For a long time, cinema has told us about the world through the eyes of men. But is there such a thing as a female gaze?

Claude Garnier: For this third episode of our podcast T'as De Beaux Yeux, Tu Sais, we are joined today by several members of the Femmes à la caméra collective. Claude Garnier, Catherine Briault, and Valérie Potonniée are conducting the interview, with Anita Makay on technical support. We are fortunate to have Muriel Cravatte with us, cinematographer, director, and member of Femmes à la caméra.

Catherine Briault: Hello, Muriel.

Muriel Cravatte: Hello to you.

CB: You were born in Brussels in 1969. You have dual Belgian and French nationality. You are a director of photography and a director of fiction and documentaries. There was no television at home, and it was in the theaters of the Latin Quarter that, as a young girl, you discovered cinema, which fascinated you from the very first screenings. Your first big impact was the Marx Brothers. As a teenager, you started taking photos and shooting Super 8 films. Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera impressed you with its freedom and poetry. You then studied at INSAS in Brussels, specializing in image. During your years at INSAS, you discovered the documentary films of Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Johan van der Keuken. In fiction, Les Petites Marguerites was a revelation for you: you loved its irreverence and extreme formalism. After INSAS, you worked for a time as second assistant cameraman to Christophe Beaucarne. You shot short films as a director and cameraman, which were more like essays or experiments. In 1995, you became the accordionist for the band Garage Rigaud. You have three children. From 2013 onwards, you were director of photography on several feature-length fiction films. In 2021, you directed your first feature-length documentary, Demain est si loin (Tomorrow is so far away), which you self-produced, followed by Mothership, your second feature-length documentary, which will be released in 2023. You shot these films on your own. You work as a director of photography on documentary projects by other directors.

CG: What an impressive list of achievements!

VP: Do you remember the first thing you ever filmed?

MC: I don't remember filming, but I do remember taking photos. I was given a little Instamatic camera, which I still have, although I don't think it works anymore. I flew from Paris to Grenoble on my own and took lots of photos of the clouds through the window. I thought they were really beautiful. I remember we had them developed near where I was vacationing, in Bourg-d'Oisans. The people who developed them at the photo shop made fun of me because I had only taken pictures of clouds, and I was really upset. (laughs)

VP: Today, as a cinematographer and director, what do you like filming the most?

MC: People's lives, I would say. Well, telling people's stories, showing the invisible, the lives of the invisible, in fact. That's often what we try to do in documentaries.

Excerpt from the trailer for Mothership

CG: We just heard the beginning of the trailer for the film Mothership. It sounds intriguing. How can we see it today, if it's still possible?

MC: It's a documentary that was produced in two versions, a 52-minute TV version and a 1 hour 20 minute cinema version. The TV version is called En pleine mer (On the Open Sea) and the cinema version is called Mothership. The TV version has already been broadcast on several channels and the cinema version has been shown at quite a few festivals and is still being shown a lot at screening debates. It's a small-scale operation, screening after screening. When there are requests, we organize a screening. I often go myself, or someone from SOS Méditerranée goes, and it provides an opportunity for discussion. It's had a good run for a film like this, which wasn't produced for the cinema. Now, the icing on the cake and the crowning glory would be to have a theatrical release, a real distribution. For the moment, there are no plans for that, but there is a good network of contacts in communication with SOS Méditerranée. We have a partnership with the LDH and Mediapart. There is quite a lot of support, so maybe a theatrical release is possible. In the meantime, to find out about screenings, the Instagram page @muriel.cravatte announces screenings taking place all over France.

CG: That's all we could hope for with this film, which we found to be wonderful and essential viewing. For those who haven't seen it, could you give us a quick summary?

MC: It's a documentary I shot aboard the humanitarian ship Ocean Viking, chartered by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. I spent two months on board during the summer of 2022. I also spent a month with a small plane that scouts the sea and works in collaboration with humanitarian boats. The goal of these NGOs is to locate people who are attempting to cross the Mediterranean and find themselves in distress, and to rescue them. I filmed both the rescues and the boat, with a clear focus on the issue of the women who are taken in on this boat. While preparing for the shoot, I discovered that on the Ocean Viking, there is a place called the Women's Shelter, which is a place reserved exclusively for women and children. No men are allowed to enter, whether they are crew members or survivors. It is a place where women, often after months or years of inhumane treatment, can finally sleep with both eyes closed.

CG: How did the idea for this film come about?

MC: There are many layers to it, but let's say there was an emotional trigger. I shot my previous documentary on the French-Italian border in Briançon, and I shot a lot of scenes in an emergency shelter that takes in exiles after they have crossed the border in perilous conditions. One day, a young woman arrived with a baby a few months old. She told me that her child had been born on a boat in distress and that she and the other passengers had been rescued by the SOS Méditerranée ship. The umbilical cord connecting her to her baby was cut on the SOS Méditerranée ship, and I held that baby in my arms. His name is Christ, and he was calm. He looked at me with his big eyes. It was both a normal and completely dizzying scene. This child already carried such a heavy history that it struck me and made me want to go and see what was happening in the Mediterranean. That was the emotional trigger. Then there are other reasons: there is a principle of reality that must be opposed to the fictions created by mainstream thinking; there is the desire to give voices and faces to exiles who are often anonymized. And among exiles, women are often invisible for a number of reasons—we may come back to that. And then there is the question of the law: beyond morality and empathy, it is extremely important to say and repeat that in the Mediterranean, NGOs have the law on their side, human rights law, but also maritime law, international law, and that the European Union and the states are breaking the law directly or indirectly, for example by getting the Libyans to do the dirty work. So there are all these dimensions, and I would say that, beyond all that, it raises questions about the world we want to live in.

CG: So in the end, there was both an emotional, personal connection, which already came from the film you had made just before, and political and feminist considerations, apart from the fact that you were going to film in this women's shelter. What was the decision you really made before shooting?

MC: There was regret that I didn't film the women in Briançon. Why didn't I film them? Because it's a film I shot intuitively, based on what was happening at the time. And women, if you don't go looking for them, they don't come looking for you. I wanted to give them visibility. There were also readings, notably a book by a researcher, Camille Schmol, who wrote Les damnées de la mer, Femme et frontières en Méditerranée (The Damned of the Sea, Women and Borders in the Mediterranean), and who says in her introduction: for a long time, women have been absent from the grand narrative of migration. They were given the status of Penelope, sedentary women waiting for their husbands to return, or followers, but not a plurality of trajectories, life paths, etc. I wanted to give them visibility and show all this diversity, to explain that there are as many migration paths as there are people, whether men or women. By focusing on women, we can also point out that, on a global scale, 50% of migrants are women.

CG: We learn a lot about this in your film. Ultimately, you chose to make a documentary on a subject that is very close to your heart. How did you make the transition from fiction to documentary, knowing full well that documentaries impose financial conditions that are already extremely different from fiction? That doesn't mean you won't make fiction again. It just means that you've devoted quite a few years to documentaries.

MC: Yes, I spent seven years in a tunnel making those two feature films, and I also made two short films. It was a fairly solitary journey because I was doing the visuals, sound, and directing. I don't really have a shot career in my life, so it's the people I meet, what happens, and the opportunities that take me here or there. I think I'm always driven by this desire to tell stories that have meaning and commitment. I discovered what was happening in Briançon: those mountains are a bit like my personal paradise, and I learned what was happening there to the exiles, who were going through hell trying to get to France. I was struck by the subject. It so happened that, at the same time, a major fiction project like Cheffe op fell through at the last minute, so I had time. I went to Briançon, first as a volunteer, and then I wanted to film because I hadn't seen the film I wanted to see about what was happening there. First I filmed, then I edited, and it became a film. It wasn't a choice I made at a certain point where I said to myself, "Right, now I'm going to switch to documentaries." I think it's more about what you want to say, the resources you have, and how you can tell the story. It's a kind of combination of circumstances, but ultimately one that you create yourself.

VP: Let's listen to what Marguerite Duras had to say in 1975 about women's cinema.

Archive of Marguerite Duras: "I think women's cinema is part of a different kind of cinema. Different cinema is, by definition, political cinema. That's true. There's no comparison between a film shot by Mr. Verneuil and a film shot by Liliane de Kermadec. Not even... In terms of financial resources. Financial resources, based on the amount of money available, make a film a political film. Films... I have never been paid for any film. I haven't even had the salary of a second assistant in eight years. That's political, too. No, alternative cinema, women's cinema, is therefore political cinema. Whether we like it or not, it's a different kind of cinema."

MC: I completely agree with what she says. I always want to add that when we say "women's cinema," I want to say "the cinema of women, gender minorities, and oppressed populations." In fact, it's all those who don't have power who are forced to develop strategies to be able to tell their stories. That's what I would like to say. Yes, in any case, in my case, it's political. After that, I find that things don't work in such a binary way either. We're quite a bit further down the line now, and there are also women who are seizing power, but who are leaving the female perspective behind a little. It's not binary, it's complicated, it flows and there are continuums, but overall, I completely agree with what she says.

VP: For a long time, men have told a lot of stories about men, and when we women pick up the camera, we tell stories about women: we go to places where men don't go, often because they're not interested or sometimes because they're places where women are among themselves, like in the Women's Shelter. By telling women's stories, we show another side of the world, from a different perspective. Do you think you have a different perspective from a man when you film women on this boat?

MC: I'm not sure if I see things differently from a man. What I do know is that I have a point of view to defend, I have things to say, and what I have to say is a result of who I am. And I am a woman who grew up in this society, which is a patriarchal society. But be careful with generalizations, because what scares me the most is the seizure of power and dominant thinking. And I find that some women who want power assimilate themselves into the dominant thinking, where other men show sensitivity. Yes, I think I have a feminine perspective, but again, we can also ask ourselves what a feminine perspective is, since I was raised in a patriarchal society. Where do I conform to the perspective that was expected of me? Women are more sensitive, more fragile, more this, more that. I find it very complicated. There's no simple answer, and we're influenced by the way of thinking we grew up with, the way we were raised. Karine Aulnette said in the podcast you did that she realized that when she photographed a woman, she would enhance her beauty more than when she photographed a man. These are effects that we don't really measure very consciously. Each and every one of us must be mindful of breaking these codes. Yes, I work to break them, but I work to break them as a woman, and also as someone who is close to gender minorities and all minorities and oppressed populations, I hope.

VP: Because you see them a bit like sisters and you give them visibility.

MC: Yes, absolutely. Migrant women have been made invisible by the stories that have been told about them, because for a long time, researchers were mostly men, and so they projected a patriarchal history onto women. They were not given the capacity to be autonomous, s in their migration. It was in the 1980s and 1990s that women researchers began to ask themselves: What about female migration? We realized that there were as many migratory life paths for women as for men, and that they were just as numerous and autonomous. Women themselves, in their migratory journeys, also tend to make themselves invisible because they are victims of systemic violence. and to avoid this violence, they tend to keep a low profile. It's a form of protective invisibility. Because of this, we have to go out and find them. The women's shelter was the perfect place for this, as it's a place where they can relax and feel safe. I took the time to explain my approach to everyone who was there, and some wanted to talk, while others didn't. Others didn't want to at first, but then changed their minds. It's a place where a lot happens in a very short time, because when the pressure eases, some who were initially very enthusiastic have a moment of breakdown. It's very emotionally charged. And so, yes, I think I was able to give them a voice.

CG: What I feel in these two projects is both the sensitivity you bring to them and your personal connection to the subject matter. But there are also things that belong to women who make these kinds of decisions, who make these kinds of films. It's a relationship to risk and danger that accompanies both films. There are still many female cinematographers who are confronted with this question: How far do I go? How do I commit myself? It's like something that breaks the feminine code, which says that as a woman, you have a more subdued relationship with danger. You go for it, and I think that if we want to make projects, we have to face that.

MC: I'm a bit... I wouldn't say reckless, but I like physical challenges. I've done a lot of mountain sports and I also enjoy that physical commitment. I admit that the sea was a step up for me because I don't know the sea at all and I'm very prone to motion sickness. Before leaving, I almost told myself that I was completely crazy to go on a boat like that. In the end, the seasickness wasn't too bad because I think I was so focused on the film that I got over it. But it was pretty crazy because sometimes, when I drive my car myself, I feel sick. At one point, I wondered if I was really being reckless. I like this physical commitment. I like this confrontation. But at the same time, I'm a very rational and cautious person, and I don't take risks. These questions are important, but the most complicated and difficult thing in documentary filmmaking is the question of the legitimacy of filming the people we film. That's where the real challenge lies, in fact, in the respect we have for the people we film and how to ensure that it is our relationship that I am filming and not just shots in the sense of images we take. All my research revolves around that. It involves establishing relationships of trust with the people we film.

VP: I suggest we listen to an interview with Chantal Ackerman that echoes what you just said about the female gaze. It's from 1976, she's 26 years old and she's talking about her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which she shot with Delphine Seyrig.

Chantal Ackerman Archive: "If you like, the film is made from images of my childhood that I recorded. I saw women from behind, bent over, carrying packages. And if you like, what I think is different from... A man wouldn't have done that, I think. A man, because from childhood, he is taught that real values are not there, that you don't make art with a woman who s the dishes. I didn't consciously take the opposite view. I did what interested me, and that resulted in this film."

CB: Muriel, your film tells women's stories, but you also show us how they interact with each other, and we felt that you had filmed many moments of empathy and fantasy in the closeness on board, as well as a taste for small moments of humanity. These are images that we often see in female cinematographers' work. What do you think about that?

MC: Well, I don't know. I always find it difficult to generalize about other female cinematographers. I know that I fall a little in love with the people I film, and it's their humanity that I try to show. That can happen during moments of action, but it can also happen during moments in between, when not much is happening. But when I film something, I tell myself a story. Just because there's no action going on doesn't mean there's no story or no poetry. It's even in these suspended moments that I find there are very beautiful things because we're in the exchange and we project emotions and images onto people's faces. When those moments are successful, I find it really powerful.

CG: Yes, we also sense that you've worked in fiction. The idea that by filming documentaries, you can tell stories is quite basic, but you give the viewer even more stories to tell than the ones you present. We feel this very strongly because you seek out the beauty in your characters and make us care about them by taking the time to film bodies that are very different from the aesthetics we are used to, which makes them very beautiful.

MC: I'm really glad that's how you felt, because yes, that's how I feel and that's what I'm trying to share. Viewers project a lot, if you give them images that allow them to do so. And ultimately, all of this is variations on a theme. It's the Kuleshov effect. It's everything the viewer can project because there have been other things before and after, so a shot in which nothing happens in terms of action is very rich in narrative.

VP: We also wanted to talk to you about the midwife, who, for us, is at the heart of the film. She's a bit like the mothership, the mother ship. She always has a child on her back, not always the same one, she takes care of many. She also heals bodies and listens to women. She is a mother to all children, but also to all women. She's like a guardian angel, I think, in the way you present her, taking care of everyone and the children. She also has a special place because she connects everyone on the boat. For example, you show this, as you say poetically, when she inflates a glove and turns it into a balloon, which is then thrown onto the boat, passed from hand to hand and goes around the boat. Can you tell us how you approached her? How did she impose herself on you in this film?

MC: I'll explain how the filming of the movie came about. It was very unusual because it's a movie I shot without any location scouting. I had never been on the boat and didn't know any of the people I was going to film, because the crews are put together at the last minute, so it was a complete unknown. With SOS Méditerranée, we had only agreed that I could talk to the midwife on board before leaving: if she didn't agree with my project, I would have to leave at another time, because I knew she was going to be the common thread, that a lot of things would go through her. Two weeks before, I spoke with . They told me, "This is Marina, she's Japanese, you can Zoom with her, but she's tired and it shouldn't last more than 45 minutes." So we spoke on Zoom and I said to her: "Hello Marina, I'd like to make a film about the Ocean Viking. I don't know if you've heard of it, the women and all that." She said yes, so I said, "Because that's what I'm focusing on, do you think it's feasible, would you mind, are you okay with it?""Yes."It was a bit Japanese, yes, no, yes, no. The conversation lasted eight minutes, and I was really disappointed. But that's how she is, actually. She's always in action and not so much in words. It was also disconcerting compared to the psychological aspect, the freedom of speech, that I might have expected. I had to adapt, but in the end, it was a very beautiful relationship that grew stronger throughout the shoot. She would call me when there were moments, scenes to film. So, it got better with time. But I admit that at first, I was a little apprehensive because of her very reserved nature... She would say okay, but there wasn't a lot of warmth. But in the end, I think she's a very beautiful character.

CG: We found it almost an advantage that she had this great responsibility and protective role, and that at the same time she did it with such simplicity and dignity. We wondered what this told us about women who take on great responsibilities, in this case on the boat, because she is very simple, even though she has to deal with really difficult situations.

MC: That's why I think she's a strong character and a very beautiful person.

Cinematographically, it's powerful, because she's not necessarily where we would have expected this type of profile, with what we can project from our culture, things that are very much conveyed through speech. In relation to me, who wanted to talk about women in exile, she is actually a good conduit. She takes us to these women. And she is so discreet that she takes up very little space. It works well in relation to the film.

CB: It's true that on screen, she's always in the action, but at the same time she's unobtrusive because most of the time she wears a mask.

MC: Yes, it was the post-COVID period. She wears it when she's with the women survivors.

VP: We're going to listen to a lecture by Iris Brey entitled "The Female Gaze, a Visionary Gaze" and then we'll see how you want to respond to it.

Iris Brey archive: "When I started doing this research on the female gaze, I realized that even though I had done my thesis at a major university, NYU, which is highly recognized, I had never been taught about women filmmakers. And I wondered about the way I was teaching and the body of work I had developed for my students semester after semester. And I realized that I wasn't teaching about women either. And I started to wonder about the erasure of certain names from history and how I think we have an individual responsibility, not only in our work, but also in our lives as viewers, to seek out and highlight works that have been erased. And why are they erased? It's for the simple reason that they were made by women."

CG: As we said at the beginning of the program, the female perspective has been missing from the world for a long time, but that is starting to change today because we want our perspective to count. As a director, do you feel part of this change?

MC: Yes, definitely. Yes, I feel part of this change and I think it's necessary and very, very important. I really feel, how can I put it, part of the movement, because I see films that I saw ten, twenty, thirty years ago, which at the time seemed important and progressive, but which are actually disastrous. I'm thinking, for example, of Thelma and Louise, which struck me as a film with two strong female characters. I rewatched it not long ago, and I'm not going to debate it, but for me, it's a disaster, actually. They're just male projections and male fantasies. My perspective is evolving. The younger generations are pushing me to do this, to question myself, to move forward. I think that's great. And then there are films that I saw ten, twenty, thirty years ago that still hold up and have been made invisible. I'm thinking, for example, of Vera Chytilová's The Little Daisies, which is a major film of the New Wave. It's a little dated now in terms of its form, but it was a powerful, important manifesto film that no one or very few people know about, except for a few film buffs. If we look back at Godard, for example, his view of women really needs to be questioned. Whereas in Les Petites Marguerites, we had a strong representation of female characters, and it has been completely overlooked.

CB: Do you think the female gaze is a different, offbeat, or dissident gaze?

MC: Once again, I think we have to tread carefully and say the female gaze, the gaze of gender minorities, the gaze of oppressed minorities. But yes, it is different because it is a voice that has been invisible for a long time and it is emerging and it is different from what has been proposed by mainstream thinking.

CB: You told us that your perspective on certain films has changed, but as a cinematographer and director, has your perspective evolved during your career?

MC: Yes, it has certainly evolved. I think I pay more attention to things that I would have overlooked in the past. I'm honing my skills, sharpening my focus in line with the times, even though I was always attentive to these issues from the outset—issues of perception, respect, and perspective. I liked what you said, Claude, in one of the podcasts, namely that often, as children, girls are given less of a voice and so they observe more. That's very true. Often, even in my professional life, I find that men speak more, whereas we move forward by listening and watching, so when we have the opportunity to speak, we have a different perspective, a different prism.

CB: For you, is there a before and after #MeToo in your perception of the female gaze?

MC: It has certainly helped me move forward. Then again, I have children who are now sixteen, twenty-five, and thirty years old, and they too support me and help me move forward. I find it very exciting to be challenged and then to keep moving forward, always moving forward and discovering new things. It amazes me, I think it's really great.

VP: Is there a work that, for you, embodies the female gaze?

MC: No, I don't think I can say there is one. I mean, there are works that have inspired my feminine perspective, but no, I couldn't name one in cinema off the top of my head.

CG: We're slowly coming to the end of the show. Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to talk about now?

MC: There's a lot of talk about the female gaze, and it's extremely important. But the world isn't binary, with men and women, and I think there should be a continuum from one to the other, as well as in perspectives. I'm in favor of maximum inclusivity. And therefore, visibility for gender minorities and oppressed minorities. What scares me most of all, my big question, is: does power make you stupid? It sounds a bit naive when I put it like that, but what I mean is that in my work, I have sometimes dealt with women in positions of power, and those have been my most difficult work experiences. The question of taking power is one that I grapple with a lot, almost more than the male-female prism, which I think has been examined a lot in recent years and which we have a keen eye for. I say: Be careful, we women, if we take power, we have to be careful how we use it. Is it power that blinds us? Or is it male power that has blinded us? Now, when women take power, it's often based on that model. Personally, I would like to see a horizontal society, but I don't know how we can achieve that. We have a lot of work to do, but at the same time, all these questions are very exciting. We've talked a lot about art, but the way we work is important, and we haven't talked about that much. Could this be a more feminine way of organizing ourselves? When shooting feature films, what also interests me enormously is working on how we work together. Like, OK, I'm the director of photography and you're going to be the assistant, you have less experience, but we have tasks that are divided up. I try not to be superior. I try to make it horizontal, we just have tasks that are divided up and everyone has their own thing to do. It's also a very big project, this work on how to work together. I think we all agree that the question of power is fundamental, as it is fundamental for women, but it is also fundamental for minorities who manage to take power. It's a question that has existed, let's say, largely since the 1970s and revolves around: what is the delegation of power? How do we manage power? This is a central question if we don't want to repeat the old patterns that don't suit us.

CG: I really like the show we do, if I may say so, because every woman we interview brings something different to the table, always on issues that fascinate us. When it comes to how work is organized, it's clear that some women violently reinforce dominant patterns. Others, from the very beginning of their careers, want things to be different, because it's very important. I would like to temper this a little: yes, when women come to power, they are not always remarkable, but at the moment, only 10% of all women and men working in the industry are female directors of photography. That's still very few. We've done a number of surveys that show that over the past 20 years, there has been very little increase. There are many women assistants who are devoted to the films and the people they work for, but there are still not many who move into positions of greater responsibility. What do you think about this and how do you see the future in this regard?

MC: It's absolutely disheartening, and I don't see why that number wouldn't increase. I'll tell you a little anecdote. At one point, when I was filming quite a bit, I went to see two women who were at the head of a very large agency of cinematographers. There were only men in the agency, and I asked them, "Why aren't there any female cinematographers in your agency?" And they said, "Because advertising producers don't want them." " And that was it, end of story. They had no desire to fight for it. There were real barriers. I was really shocked by that conversation. I think you have to believe in it and keep moving forward. I hope that the new generations of men and women are more sensitive to these issues and that things will be able to evolve favorably. With the backlash and all that, we're taking three steps back and two steps forward, but eventually, we'll get further, I hope. We have to, because the model that has brought us this far is falling apart. It's a disaster. At all levels, this patriarchal model, whether at the family level, the country level, or the global level, is falling apart. So if we want to get back up, we're going to have to do something different. I hope so. In any case, I want to believe it. I have children, so I want to believe in life and believe in the future. I can only see it that way, even if it's naive, but it's better to be naive and beautiful than cynical.

CB: Yes, let's believe it. In fact, I think things are changing, even at the agency level. We can even launch an appeal. In any case, thank you very much, Muriel, it was really interesting talking to you. Thank you to Radio RapTZ and Pierre Petiotte for allowing us to record this program. Thanks to Anita Mackay for handling the technical side. You can find all episodes of T'as de Beaux Yeux Tu Sais on the Radio RapTZ website and on Deezer, Spotify, and Apple Podcast. And above all, don't forget to follow Femmes à la caméra on social media.

MC: I just wanted to thank you and tell you that I think this podcast is wonderful. I just joined Femmes à la caméra and have attended two meetings so far, and I find that this too is a source of enthusiasm, hope, and lots of possibilities and opportunities for the future.