To the life, by Aude Pépin, follows midwife Chantal Birman, who at 70 no longer knows exactly how many young mothers she has helped give birth. Mais, tireless feminist and defender of women’s rights, she has been in many fights for contraception, deadlines for an abortion, and many more. VSIt is both to her personality and to everything she represents that the director Aude Pépin wanted to pay tribute in her documentary. “It was really intellectual love at first sight, and the feeling of meeting an icon, almost a rock star even, who had not yet been revealed to the general public “, she confides to franceinfo. “She put words on this moment of birth and pre-birth, on physiology and motherhood, with a power and a clarity that I had never heard,” she adds.
The film follows Chantal Birman in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, with several women of different origin and social status, and far from painting a transvestite reality where motherhood is only presented in a positive and cutesy way, it puts deliberately emphasizing postpartum depression, which paradoxically remains both very widespread and still taboo in France today.
With First Cow, by Kelly Reichardt, oThere is a radical change of atmosphere and landscapes: towards the State of Oregon, in the United States, at the beginning of the 19th century. The American Kelly Reichardt, who has continued to dig her singular vein in American independent cinema for 15 years, tells us this time the story of two friends seeking fortune, who to make and sell their cakes steal the milk of the famous “premiere cow “of the title, literally the first cow in the United States at the time, owned by a wealthy trader, which is not without risks.
After The last track in 2011, Kelly Reichardt made a second western in her very personal way. She contributes to renewing the genre, which according to her, is no longer viewable today: “If you show a western in a school today, it creates unease with the way women, people of color and Indians are exposed. It would be nice to have westerns with other points of view. “
We are still waiting for the film made entirely by Indians, where the supporting roles would be for the whites: this story has not yet been told
Kelly reichardtto franceinfo
The famous novel Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, was jYep many times in the theater, and adapted for television in the 60s, but had never been the subject of a film. It is now done with this rather successful version directed by Xavier Giannoli. The story of Lucien Chardon, a cultivated young provincial and poet in his spare time, who set out to conquer Paris at the beginning of the 19th century, took the name of his mother, nobler, De Rubempré, and by way of novels wrote mostly articles in a rowdy newspaper, his talent allowing him a meteoric rise in the bourgeoisie and the social life of the capital.
Rather biting and multiplying the references to our time, the film depicts a weak, venal and corrupt society, where appearances and reputation are everything. Lost illusions impresses especially by its not far from perfect casting, by Benjamin Voisin – revealed by Summer 85 from François Ozon in the lead role to Xavier Dolan, Jeanne Balibar, Vincent Lacoste, Jean-François Stévenin, among others.