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France (Virtual)

From Friday, January 7th, 2022 to Friday, January 21st, 2022
Details
France, Germany, Belgium, Italy | 2021 | 133 mins | French w/English subtitles
Category
Monthly Screenings
Film Type
Feature Film
Cost
$12 | VTIFF members benefits apply | Student w/ID $6

Virtual Ticket

Director
Bruno Dumont
Source
Kino Lorber

A satirical drama set in contemporary Paris, Léa Seydoux stars as France de Meurs, a seemingly unflappable superstar TV journalist whose career, home life, and psychological stability are turned upside down after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy street. This unexpected eruption of reality triggers a series of self-reckonings as well as a strange romance that proves impossible to shake. As France attempts to to slow down and retreat into a simpler, anonymous life, her fame continues to pursue her. Starting out as a tragicomic satire of the news media, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s provocative new film spirals out into something darker as it examines the difficulty of maintaining one’s sense of self in a corrosive culture.

* Read an extensive (and very French in style…) interview with the director HERE.

Dumont is one of the most singular and admired French writer-directors of the last two and a half decades. He directed The Life of Jesus, his first feature film in 1997 at the age of thirty-eight, shot in the town of Bailleul, his birthplace, in the north of France. The film brought him immediate recognition: selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors Fortnight, it was awarded the Special Mention for the Caméra d’Or. Pursuing a demanding and raw vein of filmmaking, Dumont returned to Cannes in 1999 withHumanity in Official Competition. The film was recognized with the Grand Prix anda double acting award for its two non-professional actors. Dumont left the North of France to shoot Twenty nine Palms in the California desert, a road movie selected for the 2003 Venice Film Festival. He won his second Cannes Grand Prix for Flanders, a harsh film on the ravages of war. He then directed two films about religion,mysticism, and their excesses: Hadewijch and Outside Satan. After a biopic in which he directed Juliette Binoche (Camille Claudel 1915), Bruno Dumont broadened his audience with the resounding success of his mini-series Li’l Quinquin, SlackBay (with Juliette Binoche), which was presented in Official Competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and was named by Cahiers du Cinéma “one of the best 10 films of 2016”. Dumont then turned his interest to the tragic fate of Joan of Arc and directed the musical Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, a selection of Cannes’Directors Fortnight in 2017, then Joan of Arc, which was at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2019 and received a Special Mention from the Jury.