L’Evenement - happening screening and Q&A at Viennale
Actress Ana Maria Vartolomei and director Audrey Diwan after a commended L’Evenement screening at The Viennale film festival event today.
“Soul and mind together, with a small smile is a huge smile; the eyes, a look for her to escape”.
The Viennale is Austria’s most important international film event, as well as one of the oldest and best-known festivals in the German-speaking world. Every October, the Viennale takes place in beautiful cinemas in Vienna’s historic center, providing the festival with an international orientation and a distinctive urban flair.
L’Evenement HAPPENING by Audrey Diwan France 2021 100min
Access to abortion, now considered an inalienable human right in the Western world, was only made possible by the courageous struggles carried out by women from the late 1960s onwards. L’EVÉNEMENT takes place at the dawn of this crucial collective awareness, at a time when abortion was still considered a criminal offence in France. Audrey Diwan brings Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel (2000) to life on the screen with a sober, sensitive touch.
Student Annie, the film’s heroine, is the prototype of a young woman determined to take her destiny into her own hands, to do what she wants with her body and consequently her life.
Shifting with a dreamy fluidity between ensemble scenes – Annie lives in a student house and shares her everyday life with a large group of girls – and the solitary wanderings of her protagonist, the director subtly expresses the troubles and vital decisions that this increasingly lonely girl must contend with. In this constantly tense but never melodramatic chronicle, actress Anamaria Vartolomei – the film’s great revelation – embodies Annie’s fate with passionate determination. In the intensity of her gaze, we can sense the entire future of female emancipation. (Maria Giovanna Vagenas)
