A Family (Une famille)
Eligible both for the Documentary and Lookout (youth jury) awards, A Family has floored audiences everywhere since its world premiere in Berlin and its Irish premiere is an unmissable event.
Award-winning French writer Christine Angot goes on a promotional trip to Strasbourg where her father lived before dying several years ago. It is the city where she met him for the first time at the age of 13, and where he sexually abused her over the following years. His wife and children still live there.
Angot takes a camera and knocks on the doors of her family to push them with questions. If healing is impossible, she expects their answers to at least provite clarity regarding their attitudes to her father’s crime, which stretched over so many years.
A cinematographic journey that challenges social norms and family perspectives in dealing with incest.
Read a short review by our Young Programmer Daniel Noonan:
Not long after finishing Une Famille, while ruminating on the consummately devastating nature of the piece of work I'd just seen, I caught myself in the act; "Well," I must have thought, "I've seen it once now. Once is plenty. I won't be going out of my way to be in a position to talk - or think - about this any time soon." It had exhausted me - the unflinching thoroughness with which Angot had examined the thing from every possible angle. But, as I was to realise almost instantly, that was an exhaustion I was prioritising, selfishly, above the entire point of the film. The silence, the disinclination to perpetuate the story, was exactly what she had spent the last ninety minutes working so hard to confront me with.
I believe much of Une Famille's power is a result of some judicious editing; In each interview scene, subtle cuts seem to transport the viewer right to the more tender, the more confronting junctures in the flow of conversation.