Hong Kong-born film director Mary Stephen is sat in a coffee bar at the Shanghai Film Art Center in Changning district where she is reminiscing about her personal memories of the iconic auteur of the French New Wave, the late director Eric Rohmer.

"He was very shy and naïve, almost like a little boy," she told the Global Times. "He loved casting his friends' horoscopes and he also enjoyed the beauty of architecture and art. He liked Eastern culture and enjoyed drinking tea very much. When we first met, he told me that I was the only person who drank more tea than him!"

'Family' member

From the 1990s right up until Rohmer's last feature in 2007, Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon (Romance of Astree and Celadon), Stephen worked alongside the French-born director as one of a few permanent staff members in Rohmer's "family." Stephen was responsible for the editing of eight of Rohmer's films, and also worked with him on creating the theme music to four of these films.

Stephen, who grew up in Canada, was in Shanghai for the ongoing Retrospective Eric Rohmer, co-organized by the General Consulate of France in Shanghai and the Institute of European Film at Shanghai Normal University and which runs until October 20.

In all, 10 of Rohmer's films, mainly from 1970s to 2007, are being screened at four different venues in Shanghai: the Shanghai Film Art Center (160 Xinhua Road 新华路160号), Shanghai Normal University (100 Guilin Road 桂林路100号), Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (231 Nanjing Road West 南京西路231号) and Alliance Française de Shanghai (297 Wusong Road 吴淞路297号).

Apart from the screenings, there will also be a series of lectures and discussions about Rohmer and his works.

"I became involved with him as one of his students at Université Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1976 because, at that time, Rohmer was a film professor at the university and I was studying cinema there," said Stephen. "He was probably the most popular film professor at that time because he was the only one who really taught students in detail about how to make a film - everything from the budget to marketing films. Therefore, his class was always packed. This was despite the fact that his teaching style involved always looking down and talking in a very slow manner."

In the 1980s, Stephen became an assistant to Rohmer's film editor, Cécile Dégucis, who was a famous technician in her own right. She was promoted to being a formal film editor after she worked on the editing of Conte d'hiver (A Tale of Winter) in 1992.

Stephen said that before becoming his student she hadn't even seen any of Rohmer's movies, but was familiar with the works of his two famous contemporaries in the New Wave, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

Urban love

"However, after working with him, I was honored to be among the first people to see his finished films. Rohmer's works often focus on relationships, especially the love between young men and women living in cities," Stephen said.

The French New Wave started in the 1950s at the same time as many seminal social and political movements were taking place in France. Typical of Rohmer's oeuvre of this time are The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), Suzanne's Career (1963) and The Collector (1967).

"Rohmer liked to be around young people and liked to listen to their stories and to give them advice and was also willing to listen to suggestions from them. There were five or six of us in his team when I first got to know him, and most of us were young at that time," said Stephen.

Wang Fang, a professor from the Institute of European Film at Shanghai Normal University told the Global Times that Rohmer's films have a "universal nature, which are not telling different stories about men and women, but are actually the same story that most of us experience at a young age."

She added: "Although most of the stories seem very ordinary, there are powerful emotions in them which can touch people's hearts in very subtle ways. For example in Conte d'hiver, the young heroine is looking for her ex-boyfriend but he doesn't appear until the very end of the movie when she meets him on a bus."

Visit www.douban.com/event/17360351/ for the screening schedules (scroll down for English)