TORONTO -- Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche says she feels like she's gone through a "rebirth" in recent months.

"I just finished a film last Saturday and I think at the beginning of shooting at the end of July, I was totally lost in the film because ... it allowed me to reach something new, I think," she said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"I can only confirm this when I'll see the film, but in my sensorial feelings as an actor, I felt it was something different."

Binoche is at the festival with "Clouds of Sils Maria," in which she stars as an actress trying to hang on to her youth as she comes to grips with taking on a more age-appropriate role in a play. Co-stars in the film, written and directed by Olivier Assayas, include Kristen Stewart and Chloe Grace Moretz.

Unlike her character Maria in the film, Binoche says she doesn't cling to the past. Instead, she prefers to "transform" herself.

"Life means some work, it means that you've got to face yourself and learn to have a relationship within yourself, and it means facing some difficulties in some relationships, some emotions that are information about yourself," said the 50-year-old French star, who won an Oscar for her role in 1996's "The English Patient" and was nominated for another for 2001's "Chocolat."

"The only way for me to stay young is to let go of the youth. You cannot hang on to the past. You cannot try to be young when you're not young anymore. But the youth is within yourself. How do you renew yourself, how do you go to a new layer of yourself? That is the real youth, that is the renewance of yourself.

"To rebirth, you can only let go of the past. There's no rebirth otherwise."

For Binoche, that "rebirth" happened while recently shooting Piero Messina's first feature film, which she said is called "The Waiting." In it she plays a mother who can't bring herself to tell the truth about her son's car crash and begins to convince herself that he's coming back.

"I loved the script and I loved his first short film, and so I was excited to work with him," she said. "I think he's going to be one of the best directors in Italy, definitely. It feels like it anyway. It felt like it on the set."

The project provided the kind of challenge she seeks out in order to continue to transform herself, added Binoche.

"Acting is really an exploration of human kind, what's happening in people's lives, and it's always been a tool for me of knowledge, in a way, and also giving myself and sharing and participating into the world."

The Toronto International Film Festival runs through Sept. 14.